David Phillips is an advocate for i, but he isn't going to lie to you. During the past eight years he's spent working with the technology, the senior programmer and analyst has found a few things that he'd like to change about the operating system and its hardware.

Still, when prompted, he goes over his "likes" first. "I like that you can stick it in the data center and run anything you want on it," Phillips says. "Linux apps, System i apps, Java, PHP, Windows if you stick an extra card in it. The flexibility and integratedness of it appeals to me. I like that it's fairly consistent from a user perspective. From a green-screen perspective, it's easier to use than other command-line interfaces."

What's the best aspect the i has to offer? "Integration," he says. "That's a cliché given that it's the reason for the i, but it really does [integrate]. It works and nobody knows it but the power guy."

Then he hops over to the other side of the fence. "The GUI tools are kind of clunky . . . . I don't like that [IBM i] seems to be more proprietary than competing platforms," Phillips says. "Why is DB2/400 different syntactically than DB2?

"[i] seems bloated," he says. "If you look at the functionality in an open-source tool like phpMyAdmin, administratively it does what Navigator does, and it does it with a small footprint and easily. I don't like the heavy feel of some of the [i] platform."

Before he started working at Adventist Health, Phillips didn't know anything about the System i world. "They talked in the interview about something called the AS/400," he says. "I thought I had heard about it in college." After growing up in Bakersfield, California, Phillips earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley area.

Adventist Health owns and operates hospitals and organizations in three Pacific states and Hawaii. Phillips supports the company's financial applications through web and database development. He is on one of four teams with about 25 developers. His programming skills are in RPG, Java, C++, and some PHP, as well as some Ruby on Rails (but not on the i).

It won't matter careerwise, he says, that his programming is i focused. The programming languages translate to other systems. "I think the world is less platform-centric than it was when I started [my IT career] — I'm not sure it matters what system I'm working on," Phillips says. "New development comes out in web applications. The System i is a great place for that, but I could also pick [the application] up and move it to a Linux box if I wanted."

His platform-agnostic attitude also reflects the way his company hires programmers for the System i. "We figure programming is programming," Phillips says. "Get a good sharp kid out of college, and he'll be able to fly through the i. For the people who do the support and administration of the box, we look more for experience on that, but the pool is smaller to draw from for System i professionals than it is for computer professionals at large. We rate tech savvy above a specific skill set."

In his free time, Phillips turns his attention to reading music rather than code. He plays the guitar and the trumpet. He also plays the French horn in a symphonic band with folks from work. The group tinkers with wind ensemble pieces after work and on the weekends and also plays for company events and church gatherings.

Looking to the future, Phillips expects he'll still be providing RPG and CL support and web development, but also possibly new development in languages that he hasn't even heard about yet. "Thinking about where we were 10 years ago," he says, "I don't think it's possible to predict where computing will go in a decade's time."

Age: 31
Job: Senior programmer/analyst at Adventist Health
How long have you been working with i technology? Eight years
What is your favorite music to listen to while working? Contemporary Christian
What is on your workstation right now? Firefox, WDSc, Client Access session, Alert Monitor, a half-dozen web browsing tabs, and 37 emails
You said it: "Most things you want to do you can find a solution on the i. Most of them come from IBM and cost a lot, but they are available."

— David Phillips

Rita-Lyn Sanders is senior industry editor for System iNEWS.