RPG Café now open
Posted: November 21, 2008 Filed under: Dave Dykstal, EGL, IBM i, RDi, RPG, System i Leave a comment »The RPG Café is now open for business. Modeled on the EGL Café and located in the same general area, the RPG Café provides a place for the RPG community to gather and share experiences and serve (we hope) as a single point of departure for news about RPG and related tools. There you’ll not only find RPG alone, but RDi, EGL and their relations.
As a result, this blog is moving, lock, stock, and barrel over to our new home. The posts and advice that are here will remain here, but new posts will be on the new blog.
Join us over there!
Dave Dykstal
i think, therefore iMac
Posted: April 16, 2008 Filed under: Dave Dykstal, Ease of use, Macintosh, Quick Thoughts 16 Comments »I have a confession.
I’m a Mac bigot.
There. I said it. Now I feel better.
I was a Windows user from the mid 1980s. I’m probably the only person you’ll run into who bought Windows 1.0 and every version of Windows since (until Vista). I’ve also played with the Lisa, the Next machine, Mac OS 9, and several distros of Linux (RedHat, Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu, Mandriva, …). I’ve written programs for OS/2 and Windows to the native API. I’ve amassed a large collection of software bought specifically for Windows.
I bought my first Macs for my kids in 1998 when they were in grade school and the things were running Mac OS 8.5. I bought my first Mac when OS X came out. I gradually forsook my Windows investment and haven’t looked back since.
The tools are there, the speed is there, the ease-of-use is there (depending on the application). The only things I long for are a decent version of Quicken, and (lately) a less bloated version of PowerPoint.
I’m curious if there is a following among i users. I hear rumors.
Let me know I’m not alone.
Please allow me to introduce myself …
Posted: April 15, 2008 Filed under: Dave Dykstal 9 Comments »I’m Dave Dykstal. I’ve had a long history both inside and outside IBM and am the only one on the RDi development team from Rochester. I’d like to think that gives me some sort of special status, but my colleagues don’t seem to share that opinion. Funny how that works.
I moved to Rochester in at the beginning of a cold January in 1977 to work on a new system that IBM was building — the System/38. I was enthralled by the technology: 48-bit address space, capability-based addressing, cool little punch cards, a whopping 64Mb disk, and these new 5250 terminals that beat the pants off the DECwriters I had used as a grad student at the University of Wisconsin.
In the first three years at IBM I witnessed the shipping of the System/38. During that time I worked on compiler back-ends and utilities. In fact, I worked on the first query utility. While I was doing that, others on my team were working on the first Source Entry Utility — SEU as we called it. The one you know and love now traces its lineage to the second version, and yes, I was there for that one too. If you don’t recall the first one, you really don’t want to know.
Since those ancient times I have worked on System/38 and AS/400 software architecture, System/38 Basic, developed some of the original UI standards for green screen terminals, developed the AS/400 user interface manager, got fascinated with graphical user interfaces, and developed the first AS/400 GUI prototypes using a new programming technique called “object-oriented programming” in the late 80′s and early 90′s.
I left IBM in 1994 for a small company called Object Technology International to work on object-oriented programming tools. In time OTI was acquired by IBM as a subsidiary and in 2003 I was back as a full-fledged IBM employee. Who says you can’t go home again?
Today I work on OpenRSE — the port of the non-i bits of RSE in the Eclipse Project. I also work on the projects support in RDi. My objective here is to communicate as well as I can (and within the limits established by my employer) where we might want to go with these over time, as well as solicit opinions from the community on various topics. I might even offer a few unvarnished opinions of my own though “Minnesota Nice” is in my nature.
My professional interests are in application modernization, collaboration, programming tools, beautiful code, and agile techniques. I’d like to help bring ideas for these to the i community, and hopefully keep learning from the community as I have in the past.
Personally, I’m a Mac OS user, an amateur photographer, and (soon to be former) president of our local UW alumni chapter. I enjoy my family, an occasional beer, and a good joke. I like to walk and when my wife and I go on vacation we prefer road trips to flying.
