Written by James Kostrewski, Student at Farmingdale State College and Open Mainframe Project Summer 2023 Mentee
Hello, my name is James Kostrewski and I am a senior in the Farmingdale State College Computer Science program. I was part of the 2023 cohort of the Open Mainframe Project’s summer mentorship program. Under the mentorship of Frank Giordano I designed, developed, documented, and tested real open-source software in Java that will modernize the mainframe experience and allow a new generation of developers to utilize mainframe systems.
My role in this project was to complete Unix System Services Rest Api wrapper calls for the SDK with the goal of publishing a new release of the Zowe Java Client SDK for public consumption. In doing so, I got experience in a wide breath of development areas such as software design patterns (where I learned about and utilized patterns such as singleton, abstract factory, and more), modern Java (including items such as the optional container class and the lambda operator), and documentation (written using Java Doc, consumed existing documentation from IBM on z/OS). Through my close coordination with my mentor, I was also exposed to powerful tools such as Junit, Mockito, and direct terminal manipulation. Watch my presentation below:
While it may sound cliché to say I greatly valued this opportunity and feel that I have grown a lot as a developer, it is the truth. The staff at the Open Mainframe Project have been extremely supportive every step of the way and provided me with all the tools needed to ensure that not only was I able to develop quality open-source contributions, but that I grew as a developer and came away from this opportunity stronger than ever before. I look forward to continuing my work on open-source projects as I progress in my career as a developer and sincerely thank everyone at the Open Mainframe Project who made this opportunity possible.
