Talsco Weekly: Software Development Is a Team Sport

Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

Leadership: Software Development Is a Team Sport.
Modernization: Does the IBM i have magical properties?
Data: IBM i - Skytap on Azure leveraging Azure Synapse. Use Skytap to modernize your legacy data.

Leadership

Software Development Is a Team Sport Here is a captivating recount of the United 1989 plane crash and the "interpersonal communication, leadership and decision-making" skills that resulted in the best possible outcome under the circumstances. One might ask, "What does this have to do with software development?" A lot, actually. Nickolas Means, speaking at "The Lead Developer UK 2016," ties this into a description of the best way to lead software development teams. He talks about "we," "no heroes," and making sure "everyone has a voice" as the pillars of successful software development. (38-minute mark) The bottom line is that "Software Development is a Team Sport." Who should watch this? Software Development Managers, IT Directors, IBM i Full Stack Developers, CIOs, etc... Why should you watch it? It will help the IBM i community build better teams. You can watch the video here.

Modernization

Does the IBM i have magical properties? You could say that it does with Merlin. We covered Merlin back in June; you can read more about it here. Merlin stands for: Modernization Engin foR Llifecycle IntegratioN "IBM i Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration"

"Merlin is a set of tools run in OpenShift containers which guide and assist software developers in the modernization of IBM i applications, allowing them to realize the value of a hybrid cloud, multi-platform DevOps implementation."

Merlin on GitHub If you want to check out what Merlin is all about, go to the hands-on Merlin Documentation on GitHub. It offers a series of getting started guides for users and administrators, along with a number of other helpful tutorials. It acts as a companion to what is found on IBM's site. Merlin's Architecture To get a better idea of what Merlin is all about, visit IBM's site on the "Introduction to Merlin Architecture." It offers an excellent visual representation of the three components of Merlin:

Merlin Certified Container: Container-based offering for well-defined domain use cases.
Merlin Platform: "Centralized place to manage users, authentication, credentials, inventory, and more for all the Merlin Tools."
Merlin Tools: Cloud experience for IBM i DevOps - IDE & CI/CD

Here is more information on how to "get up and running with Merlin."

Data

IBM i - Skytap on Azure leveraging Azure Synapse Have you ever thought about "migrating your IBM Power workloads to Skytap on Azure" so you can "unlock rich insights from data that was previously siloed?" Here is a video that will walk you through how "you can extract data from physical and logical files or a DB2 database stored within your IBM i (AS/400) libraries hosted in Skytap on Azure using the Azure Synapse Analytics DB2 connector." Use Skytap to modernize your legacy data Legacy systems hold "as much as 80 percent of an organization’s data," and there is a desire to better leverage all this vital data. "One of the best ways is to include these workloads and applications in your cloud transformation." The question is, how do we make this happen? Here is a good article that walks you through a two-step approach that allows you to create a path to migrate the workloads to the cloud and then connect the workloads to cloud-native services that are specifically designed to support advanced analytics.

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