RE: Broadening my horizons

I've got about 3 decades until retirement, so just treading water is not an option (even if I could stomach the thought).



-----Original Message-----
From: John R. Smith, Jr. [mailto:smith5646midrange@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, October 24, 2016 11:50 AM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion' <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: Broadening my horizons

I feel for you. The last few companies that I have consulted for have been "old-school". From a development standpoint they frown on APIs, embedded sql other than basic selects, and everything else that is new and cool. You should have heard the roof lift off of the building when I included a regx expression to validate an email address. I was told to change it to "normal" code which I "forgot" to do before it got moved to production.

From a business standpoint, green screen is old technology and they
want the

cool GUI stuff. They just went through a MASSIVE conversion to Oracle/RMS but because of time constraints, they had to leave a few things on the iSeries which they are now working on rewriting for RMS.

Since I can't use APIs and embedded SQL, there is no hope of ever getting CGI stuff off the ground. So, begin a consultant and always looking to improve my knowledge base in hope of getting my foot in some other door, I have been asking the same question...where do I go from here?

Are there many companies using python, php, CGIDEV2, etc. with the iSeries or are most stuck with the old tried and true because the current staff does not want to change what they have been doing for the last 20 years?

I am looking for something that does not end up creating a green screen. Is there an iSeries direction anyone sees as growing and worth spending the time to learn or should I just give up and just spend my spare time playing with the dogs until retirement?