Re:Ask HN: Is it time to quit tech industry?
by xupybd on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @09:44PM
(#25145649)
Would love to know more about your point of sales system.
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Re:Ask HN: Is it time to quit tech industry?
by thequux on Thursday November 19, 2020 @05:19PM
(#25155062)
A few years ago, I wrote https://github.com/0x20/backtab to sell drinks at the local hackerspace; it's worked well so far, and the backend has a fairly simple REST interface.
Since then, my flatmate got me interested in the AS/400 hobbyist community, and before long I had found myself the proud owner of an IBM Power 750 Express server running IBM i, with no idea what to do with it. I've wanted to use COBOL for a real project for a while, and porting the backend seemed like a fine excuse :-D
It's been slow going because the IBM docs are extremely dense, but the project so far has convinced me that if IBM i were available to hobbyists at a reasonable price, it would be a much bigger player in the market. Building simple CRUD-style apps is trivial, with the "GUI" design being almost VB-levels of easy.