Hello 2020

[worksofliam]

2019 was such a great year. Many things happened. I won the COMMON Innovation Award for a side project, I got IBM Champion 2019 for the 3rd year and I got to help lots of clients with RPG+git and Node.js stuff. Throughout this post, I will share photos of my year too!

I start 2020 with the great news that I am again an IBM Champion for this year. I feel very fortunate that IBM feels as if I am contributing to my industry and will definitely continue to do that this year. I have a few larger projects to talk about, as well as conferences, which I will write about here.

Projects

ILEditor 2

This year, myself and my friend Connor plan to finally release ILEditor 2. We have been working hard on the editor lately and there's only a handful of things left to do before we can let people start using it in the real world. Most of it is UI type things, as well as the ability to obtain a copy of ILEditor 2 as well. This is a passion project for me as in my eyes there is still a need for a modern IDE for IBM i development.

ileusion

ILEusion will finally make its release in 2020. Originally I was planning on releasing it this month in January, but I have a backlog of other things to work on so there's not much time for that right now. For those unaware, ILEusion is supposed to be the next XMLSERVICE. XMLSERVICE was great at what it did - but it was XML & had an ugly schema. ILEusion fixes both of those things by supporting JSON and having a pretty schema. For example, here's a program call:

Dcl-Pi FAK100;
  pText Char(20);
  pNum1 Int(10);
  pNum2 Int(10);
  pNum3 Int(10);
End-Pi;

{
	"object": "FAK100",
	"library": "BARRY",
	"args": 
 	[
		{
			"value": "Text here",
			"type": "char",
			"length": 20
		},
		{
			"value": 11,
			"type": "int",
			"length": 10
		},
		{
			"value": 10,
			"type": "int",
			"length": 10
		},
		{
			"value": 0,
			"type": "int",
			"length": 10
		}
	]
}

Conferences

I have a few conferences planned.

• WMCPA - Sessions confirmed
• RPG & Db2 Summit Spring 2020 - Sessions confirmed
• NEUGC - Sessions confirmed
• COMMON Europe - Sessions submitted

I am hoping some more conferences in Europe also.

While conferences are fun, I am finally doing something I've been thinking about doing for a long time now. Alongside other select conferences this year, myself and others will be hosting a free (sometimes invite-only) IBM i meetup that anyone can attend. The plan for this right now is to have one in Dallas alongside the RPG & Db2 Summit, but also one in Atlanta at the same time as PowerUp 2020.

The format for these meetups will be informal: food, friends and lightning talks about whatever anyone finds interesting (and hopefully related to IBM i of course 😄)

Boom

And that's it for now. 2020 is going to be wild and can't wait to see what happens in the world of iBM i.