Hello,
Am 21.01.2025 um 15:26 schrieb smith5646midrange@xxxxxxxxx:
So here is the question. How does one learn stuff (given the above statements) when there are no projects to work on that will use the new technology?
That's utterly hard.
I have looked for small projects to dive into but it is difficult to spend hours on something that you know nobody will ever use.
Come up with something *you* will use. Maybe?
In 2007 I almost literally hit my toe when stumbling over my first AS/400, having no exposition to the system before. I quickly understood that an empty system is boring, without applications which have some use for me.
I'm collecting radio tubes since my teenage years and I migrated stock keeping from pen-and-paper to Excel, to MySQL on Linux… and decided to take the next step and migrate to a terminal based application on OS/400. I had a goal and that greatly helped in keeping up the will and motivation to learn. And documentation for everything is readily available in the internet. That was my source of learning, with occasional more or less dumb questions in the Midrange-Groups.
That application eventually was the base for my subfile templates.
https://github.com/PoC-dev/as400-sfltemplates
Of course, this is my point of view as a hobbyist. I do Linux and network administration for a living. But then, looking at some messages in this list, as well as in the Hercules-390 based lists, and people in the Hercules-390 related lists, I regularly see proof that a leopard does indeed not change its spots: Retired people keeping their former profession as a hobby, or coming back to it after a hiatus.
And getting your own machine is nowadays no very expensive, unless you crave the newest. :-)
Yes, I am somewhat learning a new technology but it also seems like I'm wasting my time on throw away code.
Yes, that's very demotivating. Can't do this either.
:wq! PoC
midrange.com
