Re: COMMON advice

Hi Justin,

Glad to hear you'll be at PowerUp18! (The upcoming COMMON conference.)

I definitely recommend going into the personal grid tool on (powerup18.sched.com) prior to the conference and marking the different sessions you're interested in attending. Build a schedule for yourself and print it out and carry it with you so that you know where you need to be at given times.... otherwise it can be bewildering.

I strongly recommend setting aside time for the expo (both for social reasons, and to see what is out there for products, even if you don't need them today, just knowing they exist can be extremely useful in future projects) The expo is not open at all times, to be sure to plan time when it will be open. There's a lot of cool stuff going on.

I also recommend reserving time in the evenings for the social events. Just networking and meeting people can change your life and career. Literally.

If you try to schedule something during every single hour slot, you'll probably end up getting burned out quickly, so I also recommend taking time for breaks. What I usually do is plan topics that sound interesting, but aren't really important to me.... and then if I'm in the mood, I'll go. But, if I'm tired and could use a break, I'll skip that session.

-SK



On 4/11/2018 1:01 PM, Justin Taylor wrote:

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