A while ago, we decided to move from Toronto to Kingston. We sold our house in Toronto, bought a house in Kingston, and planned and implemented the move. The last step in the process was for me to find a job in Kingston. We knew that wasn't going to be easy. Kingston is a much smaller place, with less demand for programmers. As motivation, I decided that one of the things I would buy with my first paycheck would be a new ukulele. Well, I can now shop for that ukulele! I start my new job on Monday!
How did I get to this point? My "sabbatical" started getting a bit too long. So back in the Fall, I went to the KEYS Job Centre for advice. To start with, my councilor gave me some great advice on resume writing. She also recommended the MCF Kingston Practice Firm. What's a practice firm? It operates very much like a real company, allowing participants to gain real work experience, albeit without a salary. But in addition, participants are expected to spend time searching for jobs and learning the skills needed to look for work. I decided to give it a try.
I decided to concentrate on developing skills in PHP, since that's used by some local firms. I was assigned the task of developing a new software system for the local Operation Red-Nose organization to replace an old DOS-based application. I visited their operation on New Years Eve, and for what they were doing with that ancient program, they could just as easily be doing everything on paper.
To cut a longish story short, what I had implemented in five weeks using PHP and CakePHP, I had originally expected to spend most of my 12 week stint at MCF working on. Within weeks, I was able to confidently add PHP to my resume. I had expected to be at MCF longer. But an opportunity arose, I sent off my resume and cover letter, and I went for an interview and testing. I accepted an offer, and finished my stay at MCF after just those five weeks. Granted, there's still more work left to do on the ORN project. But I expect to finish that in my spare time.
What have I learned from this? First, that CakePHP is a great way to implement a web-based application. Some point out that it has a harder learning curve than other PHP frameworks. And sure, you need to understand why the framework insists on doing things a certain way. But having strong conventions is not a bad thing. In all, I think CakePHP was a good choice for that project.
Second, it helped me convince myself that the things I wrote in my resume were true. I can learn new skills. I got the skills. I know what I'm doing. I demonstrated that nicely with the ORN project. Sometimes it seems we can forget what we're capable of, and lose confidence in ourselves. Especially when between jobs.
In my previous job, I used Zope and Plone, but without ever really reaching the point of fully mastering those frameworks. I took that job because it offered me the chance to use my favorite programming language, Python. But while I still love that language, I would never recommend using Zope. We just could never get the Zope-based project to where we needed to be, partly due to the complexity of the framework, and also due to some nasty intermittent bugs. These were the kinds of bugs that you could never really be sure you fixed. And no one should have to depend on that kind of system.
(Fortunately, the Zope-based project was shelved. Unfortunately, development moved on to an ambitious .net based system, which is not really a good place to be for a Linux/Unix geek. Frankly, I was glad that moving to another city offered me a good excuse to quit that job.)
But now my new job beckons, and I'm really looking forward to it. From what I've seen so far, it seems like a really great place to work, and I know I can make a difference there. And soon, I expect to add a new ukulele to my modest collection. A banjo-ukulele perhaps?
Later, dudes!
Friday, January 27, 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
On Facebook, We Are The Commodity
Last September, Facebook foisted one of its biggest changes on its users. Like many others, I found myself faced with an almost unmanageable volume of postings on my newsfeed. The change was already bad enough to deal with, but Facebook made it clear that it was to decide what was important to me, and what could be ignored from my feed. It took me hours to configure my feed the way I wanted. And it took weeks before Facebook decided to honor my settings. But eventually the postings settled down to a more or less acceptable volume. And I discovered the trick of bookmarking https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr which always brings me to a "recent stories first" view.
To make things easier to handle, I also went through my Facebook friends, and unfriended about a third of them. Sometimes it seems like people treat Facebook as a game where the one with the most friends wins. But I didn't see much point in having such a large list of Facebook friends.
And I'm sure I'm not the only one who got the impression that Facebook didn't really care about the privacy of user information. They haven't always made it clear or easy to configure the privacy settings. Even after a flood of news articles about the importance of using the proper privacy settings, I still see many of my friends post personal family details to the whole world. I cringe whenever I see photos of children shared with the public, or when I see a persons location posted to the public. And not everyone is aware that that's happening. As a result of my own privacy concerns, I deleted almost all of my own photo albums off of Facebook, even the albums that were visible only to specific groups of people.
And then there's Facebook's new Timeline feature. Mind you, I have nothing to hide about my past postings. However, I just didn't see any point in making my past so accessible to my friends. And so I spent about four hours deleting and hiding past postings. Going forward, I plan on pruning my Timeline on a regular basis and keep just about a months worth of postings. That is, if I post at all.
With all that preamble in mind, I finally get the point of this blog posting: A couple of days ago, I mentioned to someone on Facebook that on Google+, I feel a lot less like a commodity than I do on Facebook.
Lets look at the business of Facebook. It's expected that within a couple of months, Facebook will go public with an IPO. Some people predict that Facebook will be worth $100 billion. What does Facebook own that's worth $100B? The only tangible asset they have is their user database. With about 800 million users, each user is worth about $125 to Facebook. People have gladly provided detailed personal information about themselves, where they live, what they like, and who their friends are, which Facebook can use in their own marketing endeavors. And every time you give applications access to your personal profile, you are allowing them to better target their campaigns.
So, with that in mind, whenever I go on to Facebook, I don't feel like a person. I feel like a commodity. Frankly, I count on Facebook too much to leave it completely. However, I just don't bother posting as much as I used to.
Lately, I've been encouraging my friends and acquaintances to check out Google+. Sure, they're a business too. But Google seems to be much more concerned about user privacy. And although Google+ doesn't have as many users, the quality of the postings seems much higher there. I just find it a much more comfortable place to do on-line social networking. Facebook isn't going to disappear any time soon. However, I think Google+ will, over time, attract a much more discerning audience.
To make things easier to handle, I also went through my Facebook friends, and unfriended about a third of them. Sometimes it seems like people treat Facebook as a game where the one with the most friends wins. But I didn't see much point in having such a large list of Facebook friends.
And I'm sure I'm not the only one who got the impression that Facebook didn't really care about the privacy of user information. They haven't always made it clear or easy to configure the privacy settings. Even after a flood of news articles about the importance of using the proper privacy settings, I still see many of my friends post personal family details to the whole world. I cringe whenever I see photos of children shared with the public, or when I see a persons location posted to the public. And not everyone is aware that that's happening. As a result of my own privacy concerns, I deleted almost all of my own photo albums off of Facebook, even the albums that were visible only to specific groups of people.
And then there's Facebook's new Timeline feature. Mind you, I have nothing to hide about my past postings. However, I just didn't see any point in making my past so accessible to my friends. And so I spent about four hours deleting and hiding past postings. Going forward, I plan on pruning my Timeline on a regular basis and keep just about a months worth of postings. That is, if I post at all.
With all that preamble in mind, I finally get the point of this blog posting: A couple of days ago, I mentioned to someone on Facebook that on Google+, I feel a lot less like a commodity than I do on Facebook.
Lets look at the business of Facebook. It's expected that within a couple of months, Facebook will go public with an IPO. Some people predict that Facebook will be worth $100 billion. What does Facebook own that's worth $100B? The only tangible asset they have is their user database. With about 800 million users, each user is worth about $125 to Facebook. People have gladly provided detailed personal information about themselves, where they live, what they like, and who their friends are, which Facebook can use in their own marketing endeavors. And every time you give applications access to your personal profile, you are allowing them to better target their campaigns.
So, with that in mind, whenever I go on to Facebook, I don't feel like a person. I feel like a commodity. Frankly, I count on Facebook too much to leave it completely. However, I just don't bother posting as much as I used to.
Lately, I've been encouraging my friends and acquaintances to check out Google+. Sure, they're a business too. But Google seems to be much more concerned about user privacy. And although Google+ doesn't have as many users, the quality of the postings seems much higher there. I just find it a much more comfortable place to do on-line social networking. Facebook isn't going to disappear any time soon. However, I think Google+ will, over time, attract a much more discerning audience.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Should Everything Run on IBM i?
re Shouldn’t Everything Run on IBM i?
To start with, I'm reminded of a couple of things told to me when I was job-hunting four years ago. First, a head-hunter told me that, at the time, the bottom had fallen out of the iSeries job market. Second, at a job interview, I was asked: "What's an iSeries?"
In the referenced blog, Aaron mentions that the IBM i has just seen 4 quarters of growth. That's good to see. I worked for 22 years on the iSeries and its predecessors, AS/400 and S/38. And I really don't want to see my good work go to waste.
But in his blog, Aaron suggests that everything should run on IBM i. The i is indeed a fine machine to store your mission critical data. You really can't go wrong choosing IBM i for your database. But I disagree that it should be used to run everything. (Those who like the i, tend to like it a lot, which says a lot about the system. The only people more devoted to their computers seem to be Apple fans.)
First, Aaron brings up the common strawman argument that the choice is between IBM i and Windows. Clearly, there are more choices out there, especially in the Linux, Unix, and BSD realms. For example, for the top tier in a web site, you can't go wrong with OpenBSD running on a couple of inexpensive Intel servers. You can easily configure OpenBSD to offer 100% availability, for at least your static pages, with rock-solid security.
But let's look at the application tier. Many shops choose an IBM i solution for one simple reason: The application they need only runs on i. If the application is implemented in RPG, then it's basically limited to the i. What if you need to develop your own custom application? Is RPG the best choice? Frankly, no. Thirty years ago, when I started working on the RPG III compiler, it was already an oddity among programming languages. It has advanced quite a bit since then, and I'm proud of my own contributions to its evolution. But it has not kept pace.
Is there an ideal choice of programming language? Again, no. Actually, I think that's the wrong question to ask. Today, when choosing a programming language for a particular project, you don't look at the characteristics of the programming language. If the attributes of the language were a primary consideration, Python should be the most popular programming language on the planet (in my opinion). Today, one does not program using just a programming language. Today, you use a programming language and a framework.
Consider PHP. By itself, it's a rather ugly programming language. But it's popular because of the rich frameworks implemented using PHP. In the i community, Zend is commonly used. Elsewhere, frameworks like CakePHP and CodeIgniter are popular. Other programming languages have their own rich frameworks: GWT, .net, TurboGears, Ruby on Rails, to name just a few. Lately, I've been implementing a web-based application using CakePHP, and I can attest to its convenience and power. But, as far as I know, the RPG community has nothing like these frameworks. IBM i does support a number of modern tools and languages. But then, unlike RPG, those tools are not limited to IBM i.
That is, when using an interpreted language like PHP, you have something that a language like RPG can never have: platform independence. For my own modest CakePHP application, I can run it on Windows and I can run it on Linux. I'll bet that it could also run on IBM i! In other words, by using many of these rich frameworks, you can run on many different operating systems, and so, you can render the choice of operating system platform irrelevant. To get back to the original question, should or shouldn't everything run on IBM i? I say this: It doesn't matter. And hasn't mattered for a long time.
Hans
To start with, I'm reminded of a couple of things told to me when I was job-hunting four years ago. First, a head-hunter told me that, at the time, the bottom had fallen out of the iSeries job market. Second, at a job interview, I was asked: "What's an iSeries?"
In the referenced blog, Aaron mentions that the IBM i has just seen 4 quarters of growth. That's good to see. I worked for 22 years on the iSeries and its predecessors, AS/400 and S/38. And I really don't want to see my good work go to waste.
But in his blog, Aaron suggests that everything should run on IBM i. The i is indeed a fine machine to store your mission critical data. You really can't go wrong choosing IBM i for your database. But I disagree that it should be used to run everything. (Those who like the i, tend to like it a lot, which says a lot about the system. The only people more devoted to their computers seem to be Apple fans.)
First, Aaron brings up the common strawman argument that the choice is between IBM i and Windows. Clearly, there are more choices out there, especially in the Linux, Unix, and BSD realms. For example, for the top tier in a web site, you can't go wrong with OpenBSD running on a couple of inexpensive Intel servers. You can easily configure OpenBSD to offer 100% availability, for at least your static pages, with rock-solid security.
But let's look at the application tier. Many shops choose an IBM i solution for one simple reason: The application they need only runs on i. If the application is implemented in RPG, then it's basically limited to the i. What if you need to develop your own custom application? Is RPG the best choice? Frankly, no. Thirty years ago, when I started working on the RPG III compiler, it was already an oddity among programming languages. It has advanced quite a bit since then, and I'm proud of my own contributions to its evolution. But it has not kept pace.
Is there an ideal choice of programming language? Again, no. Actually, I think that's the wrong question to ask. Today, when choosing a programming language for a particular project, you don't look at the characteristics of the programming language. If the attributes of the language were a primary consideration, Python should be the most popular programming language on the planet (in my opinion). Today, one does not program using just a programming language. Today, you use a programming language and a framework.
Consider PHP. By itself, it's a rather ugly programming language. But it's popular because of the rich frameworks implemented using PHP. In the i community, Zend is commonly used. Elsewhere, frameworks like CakePHP and CodeIgniter are popular. Other programming languages have their own rich frameworks: GWT, .net, TurboGears, Ruby on Rails, to name just a few. Lately, I've been implementing a web-based application using CakePHP, and I can attest to its convenience and power. But, as far as I know, the RPG community has nothing like these frameworks. IBM i does support a number of modern tools and languages. But then, unlike RPG, those tools are not limited to IBM i.
That is, when using an interpreted language like PHP, you have something that a language like RPG can never have: platform independence. For my own modest CakePHP application, I can run it on Windows and I can run it on Linux. I'll bet that it could also run on IBM i! In other words, by using many of these rich frameworks, you can run on many different operating systems, and so, you can render the choice of operating system platform irrelevant. To get back to the original question, should or shouldn't everything run on IBM i? I say this: It doesn't matter. And hasn't mattered for a long time.
Hans
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