Nothing moves faster than the speed of business. Sometimes, some conditions fall like an anvil and urgently require a change. The rules change, and things don’t get presented and planned in the nice, concise, and predictable way we programmers and professionals want them to be.

Change happens. Fast.

Sometimes, it’s inconvenient. Sometimes, it’s an impossible task.

But it has to happen most likely now.

Here is where a system like the IBMi and the collective knowledge of a development team can save the day and ensure the scenario facing the business receives the equivalent to the requirement.

Here is where the legacy and the investment into a system over the years pays off. Most modern ERP systems on most other platforms are not supported by in-house development and are not configurable or closed off from any bespoke development.

In the IBMi world, having a continuous action of improving and developing the software and systems has been a normal function of IT and programmers since it came on the market. Business programming languages such as RPG and Cobol were built from the bottom up to serve business functions and foster in-house programming that was able to keep businesses functioning.

IBM has built programming environments right into its operating systems to encourage the creation of software to run on those platforms. This action has resulted in thousands of commercial enterprise systems and countless programs and systems that run commerce and transactions all over the world.

Today, I worked with the development team at my company, all joined together with a recently retired senior developer to make a very important update to our system to a major change impacting our business that came at us fast, hard, and urgent. The importance was enough to bring back a master, and he gave us a showcase of “how it’s done”. It was brilliant and humbling in the same breath.

It would be nice if all the code was neat, clean, and new. It would be nice if all the work could come down the pipeline and fit into our development cycles. It would be nice if the backbones of our business systems were not such complicated monolith programs. It would be nice if all the RPG was not column-based.

But what was nice was seeing the teamwork and watching a 40-year master developer work a miracle with SEU/PDM on a monstrous and super complex application at lightning-fast speed and accuracy. Pretty humbling for me.