Open Mainframe Project’s Mentorship Program is one of our oldest initiatives. 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.
Today, we are excited to announce the launch of the 2022 Summer Mentorships, which kicks off in June and goes through August. Open Mainframe is offering 11 mentorships – opportunities to work with the ADE, COBOL Programming Course, GenevaERS, Mainframe Open Education, Software Discovery Tool and Zowe projects. Additionally, there are four member-focused mentorships for IBM and Vicom Infinity.
Interested mentees should go the the LFX Mentorship page to directly apply to the mentorships by May 18. Links to the Open Mainframe 2021 Summer Mentorships and more detail below.
Project Related Mentorships:
Additional Log Support for ADE
ADE currently support logs generated by the Linux kernel and Spark. This project is to add additional log suport for logs. An example would be logs generated by NGINX.
COBOL Programming Course Enhancements
The COBOL Programming course has seen huge success in course adoption. 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
GenevaERS – Zowe Interface Scripting
Use Zowe CLI to replace a section of a test framework for GenevaERS. This framework uses Java Code to call FTP to interact with the mainframe. We want to replace the FTP with Zowe CLI.
Software Discovery Tool Back-end and Infrastructure Enhancements
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. Our mentee 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. Finally, we’re always improving our data sources, so this mentorship will introduce the mentee to the world of open source software on the mainframe, and provide a detailed introduction to the communities, organizations, and companies involved.
Review, Advise and Contribute to the Mainframe Open Education Project
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.
Work alongside the Zowe CLI squad to implement highly upvoted community enhancements for Zowe CLI! These enhancements can be viewed here – https://github.com/zowe/zowe-cli/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc. 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 Python SDK Enhancements for Zowe v2
There is growing interest in the Zowe Python SDK! In this project, the mentee will make various enhancements to this SDK, many of which are listed here – https://github.com/zowe/zowe-client-python-sdk/issues. This work will include enabling the Python SDK to leverage Zowe team config – a major enhancement in Zowe V2 LTS. This work will be significant in moving the Python SDK toward a Long Term Support Release. We envision the Zowe Python SDK to be used in Python automation scripts, testing frameworks, and applications.
Zowe ZEBRA – Create static TypeScript types for each RMF report
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. We are looking for someone to 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.
Zowe JavaSDK Continued Development
Java SDK is 75% baked. Continue development lets add USS APIs.
Member-related Mentorships:
IBM Telum AI & ONNX-MLIR Python Toolkit
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. Additional capabilities can be explored if time allows. This would be a new project.
Portability test of MLOps for s390x (IBM)
MLOps is defining new way of improving many businesses that utilizing machine learning and AI. There are many open tools out there helping data scientists, cloud engineers and application developers to accelerate end-to-end process of AI and Machine Learning – but very limited yet to s390x platform. In this project, the mentee will help identify components and tasks that will require 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 (IBM)
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.
Secure Transcript Ledger (Vicom Infinity)
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.
The Mentorship program, which is one of five active projects that had gone through maturity lifecycle, provides a more defined path for Open Mainframe projects to connect with the next generation of developers to inject more talent into their communities. Each mentee will apply, express interest in one of Open Mainframe Project’s current projects and be matched with a mentor who is a leader or an active developer in the mainframe community.
The deadline to submit your interest is May 18. Once the submission window is closed, Open Mainframe Project mentors will go through the selection process. Please see below for the timeline:
May 18, 2022
Deadline to submit
May 23-May 27, 2022
Mentee Acceptance Notifications Sent. Mentees should begin research in their chosen project area to be ready to start the mentorship.
June 1, 2022
Mentorships begin.
August 31, 2022
All mentorships must be completed and final evaluation forms sent to be considered for participation at an industry conference.
Apply today here. Sign up for the Open Mainframe Project Slack channel, subscribe to #mentorship to ask questions and stay up to date. Or, learn more about the 2021 Summer Mentee Class here.
