The Master Terminal

Just incase you had a niggling feeling something was different but couldn’t quite put your finger on it.. we have applied a new theme to the blog. The main improvement is that everything seems to be a little bit clearer and easier to read and the sections down the side of the blog are better laid out.

Grant is a little sad about losing our nice blue colour but I think he is going to be OK!

Enjoy the new theme and as always if you have any feedback just let us know in the comments section below.

If you haven’t found his blog already, Steve Baugh has started up an excellent new CICS blog called “The CICS Guy”. In Steve’s own words from his About page ..

Welcome to my blog! I plan to post articles to share my mainframe systems programming knowledge and experience, and perhaps to ask for help now and again. The primary focus will be CICS, as that is where I spend most of my time, but I will likely have some info to share on some other items, such as ISPF, REXX, JCL, and SCLM.

Steve’s only been posting since September but already his blog is packed full of well-written informative posts with plenty of top tips.  What I love the most about this blog is that Steve totally understands the value of sharing information and blogging. This time a snippet from Steve’s first post …

I am finding that it is an exciting time to be working in the mainframe environment. Since you are reading this, it is a good bet that you are a mainframer yourself. We are lucky, you and I. Let’s spend some time sharing our insight regarding what makes the mainframe environment the place to be!

This is definitely one to bookmark. You can read Steve’s blog here:

http://thecicsguy.wordpress.com/

Industry analyst James Governor, has been blogging about Impact 2008 and he gives this blog a mention, so I thought we should return the favour. Another CICS blogger to add to the list. Thanks James.

Chris

Corneel Booysen has raised some interesting thoughts on his blog about COBOL and whether or not it is killing CICS. Being classed in the “you young ones” category I hope I can perhaps offer a slightly different perspective, so I’ll take a stab at replying.

As a young developer, I have to say I’m pretty language neutral. I don’t really care what language I’m programming in and I’m smart enough to know that no language is perfect. What I love is innovating and creating smart solutions. How I get there is largely immaterial. Generally I will just try and choose the right tool for the job. With CICS I have quite a few choices and all of them have their own uses.

Any young developer worth their salt will pick up enough to get started with COBOL within a day to a week. Certainly reading the code isn’t going to cause too many problems, assuming your code is of reasonable quality of course.

Corneel mentions “the guy in the cubicle next to you created a new web application comprising of several class libraries using his favorite scripting language, deployed it then created a blog entry and proceeded to read up on the latest technology trends before lunch – while you were compiling for the seventh time…”. Well last time I looked you could use things like URIMAPS and DOCTEMPLATES to build a fairly sweet model-view-controller style web application. You don’t even need to download any libraries! Sure you might have to compile your application a few times but I promise you with some of the great new tooling available like RDz v7.1 the code-compile cycle is almost eliminated.

I actually believe the problem isn’t related to any particular skill shortage but a more general lack of bright young graduates that are interested in working with some of the most exciting hardware around; the mainframe. So how can we fix this? Well IBM is already putting a lot of effort into the Academic Initiative as well as developing and hosting the Mainframe Challenge. There also has to be a push from CICS customers all over the world to start marketing jobs aimed a new graduates that include basic training on the mainframe. Approaching universities and asking them if they could provide courses on COBOL and mainframes in general would also help.

I am constantly reading about skills shortages around CICS and the mainframe and yet rarely I see the community standing up and shouting about how they NEED young developers. The reason that CICS feels old is simply because the community has let itself feel old. I have another blog post coming entitled “Where are all the CICS rockstars?” but that is a question for another day. For the moment though think about this. You are not too old, you are experienced. The younger generation are not about to take your jobs any time soon so relax and enjoy having us around. We can’t match your experience and all we have in our pockets are youth and enthusiasm. You don’t have to be young to be enthusiastic and you don’t have to be young to be innovative. We are down here looking up at you waiting for you to pass on your knowledge but if all we get back is resentment then we are not going to hang around for long. One of my colleagues in our excellent service team once said to me after I had thanked him for passing on some of his knowledge to me, “Helping you, helps keep me in a job.” He understood that as long as there was energy, skills and knowledge around the product there would always be a place for him. Smart guy!

So help us to build the community. Get blogging, get networking and tell the IBM CICS team what we can do to help you. Remember that us “young ones” have feelings and all we need is a little encouragement to help us and you shine. The future of CICS is in YOUR hands so stand up and be counted as the leading innovators and experts that you are.

I will be putting up a couple of write-ups from yesterdays CICS Q&A sessions at Impact later on today but in the mean-time if you are looking to connect with people at Impact 2008 this year may I recommend to you a micro-blogging web tool I use called twitter. There are quite a few people already at Impact that are using this to document their day and to keep in touch with others throughout the conference.

If you do decide to sign-up, then do say hello, you might also want to add your username to the comments below so others can get in touch with you. You can find my tweets here: http://twitter.com/chrishodgins

Give it a try and if you hate it then at least you tried but you might find it changes the way you network for good!

Update:

If you want to follow most of the Impact 2008 tweets you can do so here.

http://hashtags.org/tag/impact2008/

If you want your tweets to appear there as well then simply include #impact2008 somewhere within your tweet.  You will also need to follow @hashtags for your tags to be read.

Thanks to Corneel Booysen for being the first brave CICS blogger to let us list his blog here. Corneel is the driving force behind the CICS Wiki.

Check out his blog here:
http://www.cicsworld.com/blog/2

Last year I went on the hunt to find other like-minded people who work with an IBM product called CICS Transaction Server. A quick search found the CICS-L mailing list that I’ve been subscribing to for a while but I noticed there was a very limited supply of CICS bloggers out there. There is a wealth of knowledge on CICS-L but it is difficult to get a real feel for the community. So in an attempt to change things we have started this blog in a hope that it will encourage other CICS users to follow suit. Let us know if you do and we will add you to the CICS bloggers list on the right-hand menu so others can find you.

This unofficial blog is written by a hopefully expanding group of people in IBM Hursley and beyond who work on CICS. Expect to see posts on conferences, code samples, helpful hints and anything else that we can think of. If you have anything you would like us to talk about or any questions you are just dying to know the answer to please let us know in the comments and we will do our best to answer them.