Digging into new features, breaking them on purpose, and writing it down so the next person doesn't have to.
The IBM Champions built a Growth Blueprint kiosk for the IBM Community booth at TechXchange 2026. A couple of questions, three minutes, and you walk away with sessions, Champions to meet and groups to join. Plus a stripped-down version you can run now if you can't wait.
A Bob skill that scrapes the TechXchange session catalog, works out what you care about, and builds a day-by-day plan with alternates. What the plan looks like, and how to get yours.
A custom Bob mode (and Claude skill) that assembles your IBM Champion act-of-advocacy submission, builds a prefilled form URL, and stops you retyping your Champion ID umpteen times a year.
What MCP looks like across ACE software and App Connect in containers, where the docs cover it, and where you still have to read the YAML.
A custom Bob mode that walks you through collecting diagnostics for an IBM App Connect Enterprise support case, and how to trigger an abend on purpose to test it.
Walking through the IBM App Connect Dashboard's MCP server wizard on a Minikube install at operand 13.0.6.2-r1. What works, what doesn't, and what you have to wire up yourself when you're not on OpenShift or IKS.
MCP.Runtime in ACE 13.0.7 turns a deployed REST API into MCP tools. Here is the whole thing end to end, json and all, plus the callable flow workaround at the end.
Two credential mechanisms, one pre-emptive and one reactive, and the silent "no error, no header" trap. Reproduced on ACE 12 and 13.
How to start an IBM ACE integration server without starting everything in it, and how to keep flows stopped across deployments.
A walkthrough of upgrading an existing ACE Operator + Dashboard + IntegrationRuntime install from 13.0.4.x to 13.0.6.2-r1 on Minikube, including the license-ID rebadge that silently blocks the upgrade.
An MQ 9.4.0.21 cumulative security update killed mqweb in two different ways on the same morning, a broken TEMP path that Liberty refused to claim, and an ltpa.keys file the new JRE wouldn't decrypt. Here's what happened and what went into the runbook.
Enabling the MCP.Admin block in server.conf.yaml, hooking MCP Inspector up to a standalone ACE 13.0.7 integration server, and walking through every admin tool the runtime exposes , with the real JSON request and response for each.
A walkthrough of an ACE v13 migration, from Transformation Advisor through Java 17 cleanup to what actually breaks once you flip the switch.
Replacing mqsisetdbparms with the ACE vault
A summary of all the new features for ACE v13 up to 13.0.8.0
mqsirestart solves all your restart needs!
No middleware this time: two days of IBM Storage
How to run PlexTraktSync in Docker to sync Plex watch history, ratings, and collections to Trakt, including fixes for Google login and Docker networking issues.
A look behind the scenes at how this blog is built and deployed, using MkDocs Material, a custom Python script for metadata generation, and GitHub Actions for automated publishing.
Detecting fish-like movement in the Dutch fish doorbell stream with Python, OpenCV and a mildly unreasonable amount of tuning
This post shows how to validate a DFDL schema with IBM DFDL outside the Toolkit using a simpler CLI-based flow. It covers the setup and validation scripts I added to ibmDFDLCrossTester, support for ACE 12 and 13, useful trace output for debugging, and a few schema gotchas worth knowing up front.
The sixth installment in the Containerizing ACE series, tackling why upgrades become boring (in a good way) when you containerize
A practical, field-tested setup of the PGP SupportPac on ACE 13.0.6.0, from key generation to working encryption and decryption flows, including the runtime jar details that tend to get missed.
Using the Context Tree in a second real life use case, logging
An LLM that runs locally on your phone, I've got to give that a try
Even though we hardly ever see it, IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE) is perfectly capable of running on plain Kubernetes.
TechXchange 2025, what you missed
The fifth installment in the Containerizing ACE series, tackling why do ACE containers take so long to boot?.
The fourth installment in the Containerizing ACE series, tackling a number of ways to determine your container content
The seconf installment in the Containerizing ACE series, tackling images and artifacts
The third installment in the Containerizing ACE series, tackling some container concepts to keep in mind
IBM TechXchange Early eXperience 2025.
The first installment in the Containerizing ACE series, tackling the basics concepts
Using the new context tree in an actual functional use case
Managing your cipher security
How can we properly create clean JSON arrays
Hyping the EventLogMonitor tool
Aka "The Blog That Reads like an Agatha Christie Story" or "The Overly Dramatic Description of a Simple Problem".
Let's talk about SELECT in ESQL — and I don't mean database queries (although they are rather similar)
Automating windows installations of ACE through scripting
When working with IBM App Connect Toolkit, running unit tests on integration flows with custom configurations can be quite challenging.
Keeping a clean workspace
Making unit testing work for you, how to ignore specific data
Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the IBM TechXchange early eXperience program for IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE) at the historic Hursley House
Utilizing JSONata in the new Log Node
Properly handing and parsing the ACE Exception list to retreive the most usefull information (with JSONata)
Prepare your ACE migration
I wanted to try the new (re-introduced in 12.0.2.0) ACE Business Transaction Monitoring to see what the added value could be for a company/team/environment that.
Today automated builds and deployments are a must to support business demands. IBM App Connect Enterprise (ace) offers strong capabilities to automate build and.