400 blogs

This is my 400th blog on this site, and I thought it was enough of a milestone to deserve some sort of recognition. And I thought it would be an opportunity to look back on all the things that have happened since that very first blog back in June 2006. In truth, I have published some guest blogs – so not all 400 have been written by me. But, I’ve also written blogs that have been published under other people’s names on a variety of sites, and I’ve had nearly 40 blogs published on the Destination z Web site.

Back in 2006, I was doing a lot of work for Xephon – I was producing and editing those much-loved Update journals. You probably remember MVS (later z/OS) Update, CICS Update – the very first one – DB2 Update, SNA (later TCP/SNA) Update, RACF Update, and WebSphereMQ Update. My very first blog was on the Mainframe Weekly blog site and was called “What’s going on with CICS?”. The first paragraph read:

What do I mean, what’s going on with CICS? Well, CICS used to be the dynamic heart of so many companies – it was the subsystem that allowed the company to make money – and as such there were lots of third parties selling add-ons to CICS to make it work better for individual organizations.

And over the months that followed, I talked about AJAX, Web 2.0, Project ECLipz, Aglets (DB2 agent applets), social networking, back-ups and archives, new versions of CICS, DB2, and IMS, and significant birthdays for software. I blogged about mash-ups using IMS, I gave a number of CSS tips, I wrote about BPEL, I even discussed PST files and the arrival of the Chrome browser. And back in November 2008 I first looked at cloud computing.

In 2009 I talked about CICS Explorer, Twitter, cloud computing, specialty processors, zPrime, mainframe apprentices, that year’s GSE conference, IBM’s London Analytics Solution Centre, more anniversaries and software updates, and much more.

2010 saw more blogs about the recession, IBM versus Oracle, social media, Linux, clouds, performance, the zEnterprise, some thoughts about SharePoint, Android, and connecting to your mainframe from a phone, SyslogD, the GSE conference, and lots of other thoughts on the events of the year.

2011 had a lot of blogs about cloud computing and virtual user groups, as well as more about SharePoint. The SharePoint blogs were also published on the Medium Sized Business Blog part of TechNet Blogs (http://blogs.technet.com/b/mediumbusiness/). I also had a serious look at tablets. And wrote the “What’s a mainframe, Daddy?” blog. I had a look at IMS costs, mainframe maintenance, and Web 3.0 and Facebook (with the use of OpenGraph). I also examined gamification and augmented reality and what they meant for the future of software.

In 2012 I mentioned IBM Docs, how to create an e-book, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), operating systems on a memory stick, cloud wars, and using the Dojo Toolkit to make the end user experience of CICS nicer, and more friendly (of course). There was talk of RIM, Hadoop, IOD, and Lotus.

2013 saw quite a few blogs about big data. My Lync and Yammer blog was republished on the IT Central Web site. And I looked at social media, bitcoins, and push technology, as well as IBM’s new mainframe and much else.

So far in 2014, we’ve covered more about big data and enterprise social networks, we’ve looked at NoSQL, Software Defined everything, and our old friends REXX and VM/CMS, and a lot more besides.

Over the years there have been frequent blogs about the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, and in particular its user survey results.

Are the blogs any good? Well, over the years they have gained various awards and quite a few have been republished on a number of different Web sites, where they’ve been getting positive reviews and plenty of hits.

You can read my blogs at mainframeupdate.blogspot.com, and it.toolbox.com/blogs/mainframe-world/. You can follow on Twitter at twitter.com/t_eddolls, or on Facebook at fb.com/iTechEd – and we appreciate you ‘LIKEing’ the page.

What about the future? The blogs will continue and, as usual, I’ll mainly focus on what’s happening with the mainframe industry, but I think it’s important to take a wider view and keep abreast of new IT technologies and ideas as they happen and try to put them in context and give my evaluation of them.

If you have read all 400 – thank you. If this is the first one you’ve read, then hopefully you’ll be back again next week for more!

Trevor Eddolls
IBM Champion