Open Mainframe Mentorship Summer 2022

Open Mainframe Mentorship Summer 2022 

The Open Mainframe Mentorship program continues to thrive as it matures as one of our most popular projects. Since launch, the Mentorship program has helped more than 60 students gain experience in a hands-on learning experience with Linux, open source and mainframes. This year, we had the highest number of applicants for the Summer 2022 term, which begins on June 1 and ends on August 31. More than 500 developers and students applied for the 13 mentorship programs. It was difficult for the mentors to select them but, ultimately, they chose 17  diverse mentees that yielded from Latin America, Asia, and North America.

Robert Dahlberg, Chair of the Open Mainframe Project Mentorship Program and Ph.D. Assistant Professor at VCU, works with mentors to design projects that address specific mainframe development or research challenges. These mentors are leaders from member organizations and within the open source and mainframe community, and work closely with their hand-selected mentees on their projects.

Mentorship this year include member initiatives for IBM and Vicom Infinity as well as Open Mainframe projects such as Zowe, Mainframe Open Education, Software Discovery Tool, COBOL Programming Course and ADE. The mentees will complete their summer term with real-world, hands-on experience utilizing Linux, open source, and mainframes that they can carry with them into the next phase of their career path.

Introducing the Mainframe Project 2022 Summer Mentees and Mentors below:

Zowe Python SDK Enhancements for Zowe v2 (2 Mentees)

Mentee: Richard Gregory, Self-taught

Mentee: Soumik Dutta, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi, India

Mentor: Michael Bauer, Product Owner at Broadcom

• Fun Fact: He races sprint cars.

Mentor: Timothy Johnson

• Fun Facts: He is passionate about open source and creating apps in his spare time.  He owns too many Raspberry Pis for hobby projects and likes traveling around the world to explore nature and take photos.

Mentorship Description: In this project, the mentee will make various enhancements to this SDK. This work will include enabling the Python SDK to leverage Zowe team config – a major enhancement in Zowe V2 LTS. This will be significant in moving the Python SDK toward a Long Term Support Release. 

Zowe CLI Enhancements

Mentee: Sarthak Jain, DSEU Shakarpur Campus, India

Fun Facts: Likes to code and solve problems using the same. He is an inquisitive person and in his spare time he prefers to read and watch technical content. Sarthak also loves to listen to music.

Mentor: Fernando Rijo Cedeno

 

Mentorship Description: Work alongside the Zowe CLI squad to implement highly upvoted community enhancements for Zowe CLI!  This project will initially focus primarily on enhancements to our popular jobs and files command groups with potential to expand to other areas if time permits. The Zowe CLI has been instrumental in enabling popular distributed tooling to integrate the mainframe platform.

Zowe Java SDK continued Development 

Mentee: Xiaoyang(Jason) Xie, Western University, Canada

• Fun Fact: He plays ping-pong ball, loves photography, and watching movies.

Mentor: Frank Giordano

Program Description: In this project, the mentee will make various enhancements to this SDK described here https://github.com/zowe/zowe-client-java-sdk/issues/219. The main feature set for the summer program is to leverage Zowe team config introduced with Zowe V2 LTS and the introduction of Unix System Services APIs.

Software Discovery Tool back-end and Infrastructure Enhancements

Mentee: Arsh Pratap, ABV – Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, India

• Fun Fact: He is a huge video game enthusiast.

Mentor: Elizabeth K. Joseph

• Fun Fact: Elizabeth started working on mainframes in 2019. She is a big Star Wars fan and she received her amateur radio license during the pandemic. 

Mentorship Description: The Software Discovery Tool is a web application written in Python Flask for searching for open source software related to the IBM Z / s390x hardware architecture. The program will work on improvements to the Python Flask back-end for more reliable generation of data sources on lower resource systems and improvements to reliability of the production deployment on the Linux environment where it runs. 

COBOL Programming Course Enhancements

Mentee: Sri Sai Natha Rao Pathange, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee, India

Mentor: Hartanto Ario Widjaya

• Fun Fact:  Hartanto loves learning about history. He was a mentee for the COBOL Programming Course last year. In his opinion hash browns are way better than fries. 

Program Description:  The summer mentee will go through the COBOL programming course to learn COBOL and help the project:

1. Update current course with ZOWE V2
2. Edit Getting Started chapter into two – removing setup instructions into an appendix or a separate ‘Setup’ chapter
3. Add Processing JSON and XML to Advanced chapter
4. Create a new chapter about CI/CD and Unit Testing with COBOL Check

         – Investigate how to incorporate COBOL Check into the course

5. Create a Gitbook of all the updated, new COBOL course content

Secure Transcript Ledger 

Mentee: Rene Bulnes, Bergen Community College, Honduras

Mentor: Vincent Terrone

Program Description: Develop a blockchain capable of keeping a record of student grades. It will allow input from designated users (Instructors). Each block will contain a course name and ID, a grade, and a student ID (SID). Each SID will be linked with the student’s personal information, and this record could also be shared utilizing a smart contract; reducing the risk of access by unauthorized third parties to personal data. With the SID, institutions or individuals will have access to review a complete transcript.

The successful development of this blockchain will provide a secure platform that improves the application process and times for school transfers, jobs, and scholarships.

IBM Telum AI & ONNX-MLIR Python Toolkit (2 Mentees)

Mentee: Jiaqing Chen, Arizona State- PhD Student, US

Mentee: Jatin Pandey, Delhi Technological University, India

Mentor: Andrew Sica 

Mentor: Gong Su

Program Description: The IBM Telum AI accelerator will be exploited by open source packages such as ONNX and ONNX-MLIR. This project will be to explore and create a python toolkit to simplify model conversion to ONNX and provide python APIs to use the ONNX-MLIR model compiler. 

Create Static TypeScript Types for Each RMF Report

Mentee: Salisu Ali, Medicine and Surgery, Bayero University Kano, Nigeria

Mentor: Justin Santer

Program Description: The ZEBRA project is moving to TypeScript from Javascript and would like to enhance the developer experience. With static types of RMF reports, developers can take advantage of intellisense from IDEs like VSCode. They also increase the maintainability of the codebase. The mentee will help go through the RMF Programmer’s Guide documentation and help map out the structure of RMF reports and come up with optimized TypeScript types and interfaces.

Portability test of MLOps for s390x

Mentee: Rudra Prasad Dash, B.Tech Biomedical Engineering, India

• Fun Facts: He codes, plays volleyball and watches anime.

Mentor: Alex Kim

Program Description: MLOps is defining a new way of improving many businesses that utilize machine learning and AI.  In this project, the mentee will help identify components and tasks that will be required to port certain popular MLOps tools (such as Ray) in open source space and also help estimate the work that will be involved to port to s390x architecture.

SQL Pushdown Enhancements (2 Mentees)

Mentee: Yashasvi Misra, SRM Institute Of Science and Technology, India

• Fun Fact: She loves to draw/paint and also loves to explore new technology and places.

Yashasvi recently started to give public talks at community meetups to help her come out of her comfort zone. 

Mentee: Wei Sun, Rutgers University 2022 Graduate, US

Mentor: Petr Novotny 

Mentor: Hong Min

Program Description: The SQL Pushdown is an open-source Python based library providing familiar interfaces of Dataframe-mapper and Sklearn data transformation objects to allow to perform data pre-processing tasks in database servers (e.g.: Z hosted DB2, Postgres and others) as opposed to in-memory. The project will focus on building a test suite of the existing library and on extension of the library features with additional functions such as conversion of Scikit-based pipelines, serialization, and others. 

Additional Log Support for ADE

Mentee: Shashwat Jaiswal, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bhilai, India  

Mentor: James Caffrey

Program Description: ADE currently support logs generated by the Linux kernel and Spark.  This project is to add additional log support for logs.  An example would be logs generated by NGINX

Enable JIT for LUA on IBM z

Mentee: Aditya Bisht, Indian Institute Of Technology Roorkee, India

• Fun Fact: Is a Chelsea fan, watches anime in his  spare time, and uses Arch.

Mentor: Neale Ferguson

 

Program Description: Complete existing work on providing JIT capability to LUA for IBM z.

Review, Advise and Contribute to the Mainframe Open Education Project

Mentee: Tiiso Senosha, University of Johannesburg, South Africa 

• Fun Fact: Enjoys hanging out with friends and playing video games. He also loves growing plants from seeds and taking care of them, and reading.

Mentor: Lauren Valenti, Head of Mainframe Education And Customer Engagement at Broadcom

• Fun Fact: Learning how to ski with her 8-year-old son. 20+ years of industry experience with 8+ of those in Mainframe.

Program Description: With the Mainframe Open Education Platform just launching, we need help with reviewing content, advising the team if we are missing content, what would help those from Universities, etc to use, and contribute by helping us increase awareness of what we are trying to do for the Mainframe Community. 

The mentees will be blogging about their journey and producing videos about their experience. Open Mainframe Project will also be launching applications for Fall Mentorships. Stay tuned here for more.