RE: COMMON advice

*DROOL* A free trip to COMMON!

First, you need to ask your boss if there's anything in particular he wants you to attend. Hopefully, he won't fill up your entire schedule!

Next, sessions that you think will expand your knowledge of the system and any upcoming problems you'll need to solve.

Finally, at least one session just for fun-- something that caught your attention; it doesn't have to relate to what your job is, but looks interesting!

In the very old days I used to like to attend any session by John Sears (he retired in 2000). He used to talk about the internals of the machine, how different things worked together. I never understood it all, but it gave me a sense of what the system was actually doing under the covers! You get to a point where someone says something and you answer, "That's not how I think it works..." You don't know why you said it, but it doesn't 'feel' right. That's the kind of information you need to find!

Related to the internals of the machine is something that's always complicated-- Work Management. The fine art of arranging subsystems, routing programs, memory pools and allocation, jobqs and outqs, classes, and all the other bits that let the machine actually do something! If there's a session on work management there's always something more to learn!

Paul E Musselman
PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Justin Taylor
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2018 2:02 PM
To: MIDRANGE-L (midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx) <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: COMMON advice

This morning, our Windows manager dropped a COMMON brochure on my desk and told me he wants me to go. After I fell out of my chair, I began looking at the sessions. I've been in this business for a long time, but I've never been to a conference or any kind of training. I'm hoping to solicit some advice on what sessions to attend.

We're a 2.5 man shop running mostly 5250 apps on a 720. I'm both a dev and the admin. My primary dev role is connecting IBMi with non-5250 clients, originally via Db2 stored procedures (RPG & SQL) and now mostly webservices (DIY RPG CGI & CGIDEV2). I have about a dozen web apps done using CGIDEV2, jQuery, HTML and JS. I know some Java and have a couple of Java utility apps.

I'd like to attend every session, but that's not really possible. So I'd love some help narrowing down the choices.

TIA