Latest from Bob
Using IBM ADDI and VTP to Enhance Observability in Mainframe Development
Observability has always been a key factor in software development – not so much on the mainframe. However, the rise of the internet as the go-to platform for modern commerce has caused an explosion of transactional activities. There’s much more complexity behind the scenes than the request/response activity that used to be the usual interaction […]
Feb 3, 2021 · 3 minAll articles by Bob Reselman
Showing 1–24Wazi VTP Test Recording Streamlines Mainframe Testing
Mainframe developers have an easier time testing with the Wazi Virtual Testing Platform Working with test data is tricky. If you’re a developer working in a distributed environment, things are difficult enough. It seems as though you’re forever replenishing test data on a database in your local system or one that’s dedicated to you out […]
DRY Comes to COBOL in IBM Z Development
Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) is a fundamental tenet of modern computer programming. Just about every CS student is taught that duplicating code in an application is an accident waiting to happen. The hazard is that you might alter a piece of code in one place, only to leave another identical instance of that code unchanged. […]
Metropolis Now: The Two Worlds of Employment in the Age of Automation
Current events have revealed that there are two worlds in the employment landscape. One is digital, the other analog. For the most part, those in IT—the digital workers—have been unaffected by the spike in unemployment due to the economic side-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, it doesn’t mean they’ll be untouched in the long-term. As […]
Social Distancing in the Age of Automation
An unintended consequence of COVID-19 is that the practice of social distancing might remain long after the threat posed by the virus subsides. It seems as if COVID-19 (aka the Coronavirus) has appeared out of nowhere. At the end of 2019, we were all unwrapping out holiday gifts and looking hopefully into a new […]
Commercial Objectives in the Age of Automation
When I was 17 years old, back in 1971, I sold orange juice near a busy street corner in New York City. My job was to stand out in front of a fruit stand and dispense quarts of OJ from a machine. It was pretty simple: keep the hopper on the top of the machine […]
IBM Z Open Editor Support for Language Server Protocol is a Game Changer
The integrated development environment (IDE) is an indispensable tool for software developers. Before it came along, coding was a laborious, detail ladened undertaking. We’ve become accustomed to the syntax checking and code completion features than even the most basic IDEs provide. These days we tend to forget how hard it was programming with nothing but […]
TDD, Unit Testing and the Mainframe
Unit testing is like exercise: Companies know it’s good for you and you should do it, but given their druthers, they’d rather avoid the effort and just get to the benefit. I wish I could say it’s otherwise. After all, making unit testing a standard practice in a company’s software development process is probably the […]
CAP Theorem No Match for Mainframes
One of the biggest problems in modern distributed computing is data management. These days data are spread out all over the place. As a result, getting the data you need, exactly when you need it, becomes a problem. Wider distribution creates more network latency. If you have a system in which some machines are in […]
Technology: Isolation in the Age of Automation
Dependence on technology makes us more independent overall, but it also makes us more isolated. So, what happens if things come to the point where we depend on machines more than we depend on other human beings? Earlier this month I attended a presentation about machine learning on mobile phones at Google IO 2019. Right […]
Mainframes: The Cloud Before the Cloud
Here’s something to think about: Despite the fact that IBM stopped manufacturing personal computers in 2005, deciding instead to focus on higher margin business services, the company continues to produce mainframes and by all estimates will continue manufacturing them well into the future. The question is, why? The answer: because there is still significant demand […]
ABO and the Mystical Art of Source Code Compilation
Compilation can make or break the performance quality of an application. A developer might spend weeks creating the most elegant, efficient algorithm known to man, only to have it run at a snail’s pace in production because the compiler used to create the application’s executable binary is old, and not optimized to take advantage of […]
Full-Time Employment in the Age of Automation
Back in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote a short essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” in which he predicted that in a hundred years the 15-hour work week will be commonplace. Keynes made this assertion based on two factors: first, the increase in capital due to extraordinary yields from the compound interest that […]
Minor Crimes and Misdemeanors in the Age of Automation
Giving automation the power to detect crime and enforce punishment has ramifications, even for minor infractions In November, I broke the law. I crossed over a solid white line to make a right turn at a traffic intersection. At the time I was unaware of my violation. I was on my way to a shopping […]
Best of 2018: The Beauty of the COBOL Programming Language
As we close out 2018, we at devopsy.kinsta.cloud wanted to highlight the five most popular articles of the year. Following is the first in our weeklong series of the Best of 2018. Well-written code is a work of art. Always has been, always will be. A programmer pulls a thought pretty much out of nowhere […]
Reducing Poverty in the Age of Automation
In 1966, more than half of the people in the world lived in extreme poverty. I don’t mean public housing, food stamps, subsidized school lunch, free health clinic poverty. I mean the type of poverty in which there’s no electricity, no running water, no toilets and open sewers, and most children never see a doctor […]
Life and Death in the Age of Automation
Has automation changed the way we perceive interaction with others? A few weeks back I got an email from an old friend, Jim. Typically, that’s no big deal; I get emails from old friends all the time. Except, in this case, it was different. According to a posting on Facebook, Jim passed away about a […]
Dependency Based Build Promotes the Freedom to Program
Whenever I want to be amazed, all I need to do is reflect on the fact that the continuing development of the Linux operating system is done essentially by a community of volunteers. That’s right! One of the most popular and important operating systems is updated and maintained through donated labor. Any programmer anywhere in […]
Education in the Age of Automation
Automation is changing the nature of education and the ways people learn. More schools are using online learning to supplement in-class activities. In fact, some schools are completely online. Distributed computing on the internet and the automation that drives it makes this possible. Everything changes when the formal education process becomes embedded in the internet. […]
Implementing DevSecOps in the Mainframe-Driven Enterprise
DevSecOps is emerging as an important trend in corporate IT. It makes sense. With each passing day more applications serve a larger user base. Whereas in the past the typical business application was accessible only from within the confines of an enterprise’s internal network, today, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) paradigm enables millions of users work with […]
Hardware in the Age of Automation
There’s a joke making its way around the internet that goes like this: Q: How do DevOps engineers change a lightbulb? A: They don’t. It’s a hardware problem. The trend to abstract hardware away from the day-to-day work of most IT personnel continues. We in DevOps have given it a name: infrastructure as code. Hardware […]
When It Comes to Mainframe Computing, There’s More to Containers Than Containers
When people in the DevOps world hear the word “containers,” most of the time they imagine the lightweight, standalone, executable Docker binaries that have become commonplace in today’s cloud infrastructure. It might come as a surprise, however, that the world of mainframe computing not only supports traditional Docker containers, but also expands the concepts of […]
Thinking About the Future in the Age of Automation
Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s imagine a world in which almost all the work required to sustain human life on the planet is performed by intelligent machines. Think about it: All the crops get planted, raised and harvested by robots. Same for livestock. Machines make all the clothing and build all the houses. People […]
Coming Apart in the Age of Automation
One of the fundamental tenets of DevOps is that working in closed, departmental silos is counterproductive for creating quality software. Rather, work is done best when groups are composed of members from across the business working openly and cooperatively. Experience shows time and time again that open, multifaceted teams made up of a variety of […]