Open Mainframe Project Mentorship Program Launches in May and Continues to Flourish Despite 2020 Challenges
We at Open Mainframe Project know it has been a difficult year. 2020 has brought many challenges including a global pandemic that has left the whole world being quarantined at home. Despite these challenges, many developers have flocked to various open source communities to help develop code, get more training, create more solutions and, overall, be more active in their interests.
This is also true for developers in the Open Mainframe Project. In fact, we launched our 2020 Mentorship Program as planned and welcomed 10 new mentees. These mentees are paired with mentors from OMP member organizations such as IBM, Rocket Software, SUSE, Vicom Infinity and Zoss Team LLC. These mentors worked with Robert Dahlberg, Chair of the OMP Mentorship Program and Ph.D. Assistant Professor at VCU, to design a project that addresses a specific mainframe development or research challenge.
Meet the mentees and their projects below:
Name: Sudhanshu Joshi
School: 2020 graduate from Army Institute of Technology, Pune, India
Mentor’s name: Joe Devlin, Zoss Team LLC
Project: InZpect
Why were you interested in this project? The project is challenging to work on and something new to explore.
Bio: I am a tech enthusiast interested in solving real-world problems. I love participating in hackathons and I am always eager to explore new tech. I have learned most of the stuff through the internships that I have participated in. Apart from this, I often write at times – sometimes articles related to tech and sometimes poems about life.
Name: Kai Wong
School: A sophomore at Beijing Institute of Technology, Zhuhai
Mentor’s name: Chen Ji, IBM
Project: Enhance zvm Prometheus exporter
Why were you interested in this project? Feilong provides a convenient way to manage mainframes. With its SDK, I can quickly develop new system management tools.
Bio: I extremely enjoy programming and open-source. I have learned about C for six years. I am also familiar with C++, Python, Golang, Rust and web-development. I have worked as a mentee in Alibaba Summer Of Code 2019. I am deeply interested in software development and cloud technologies. I started devoting my time to open-source for fun and spend most of my time on it.
Name: Ayush Shridhar
School: International Institute of Information Technology, Bhubaneswar, India
Mentor’s name: Jim Caffrey, IBM
Project: Advanced log support for Anomaly Detection Engine
Why was I interested in this project? The idea of applying statistical learning for anomaly detection is pretty intriguing. Not only does it have far reaching advantages, but it lays the groundwork for building other advanced things on top of it. ADE has proven to be effective in this direction but unfortunately its usage is very limited.
This is because ADE has been developed keeping only Linux Syslogs in mind. Enhancing the project to incorporate more complicated logs would not only increase the usability of ADE, but also showcase its ability as a fast anomaly detection system for other middleware purposes such as in web servers and high performance computing based applications.
Bio: I’m a final year undergraduate majoring in Computer Science. I’m interested in applications of machine learning algorithms, high performance computing and AI research.
Name: Mitesh Goplani
School: Vivekanand Education Society’s Institute of Technology, Mumbai University
Mentor: Sean Grady, Rocket Software
Project: Zowe Desktop Application State Persistence Mechanism & REST APIs for Files and Datasets
Why were you interested in this project? State Persistence Mechanism is an interesting project for Zowe Desktop which requires the developer to be well-versed with the internal working of ZLUX and provides an opportunity to contribute to a project that would be consumed by many Zowe Apps to persist their states when session expires. I believe my experience with web development in Angular along with security background would be helpful in development of State Persistence Mechanism for Zowe Desktop considering the security aspects of the methodology involved.
Bio: I’m a security enthusiast with profound interest in web based applications. I’m certified as an Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP) and Offensive Security Web Expert (OSWE). I’m pursuing Computer Science (Bachelors) from Mumbai University (current avg. 9.1/10). I was the principal developer and maintainer of Med Student App (previously known as Health Savvy App). I’ve co-authored a paper titled ‘Animate Object Detection and QGroundControl’ (ICTCS’19). I have worked with 1MartianWay to provide technological solutions to Warehouse Management problems (Companies: ACC Cement, Mahindra Logistics). I’ve contributed to several industry based projects like Deep Blue (Mastek & Majesco), E-YRC (IITB). I’ve participated and won hackathons like Code for Good (J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.) , SIH’19 (Robert Bosch & Co.).
Name: Ayeshmantha Perera
School: Srilanka Institute of Information Technology
Mentor’s names: Jean-Philippe Linardon, Rocket Software, and Sean Grady, Rocket Software
Project: Zowe-App-Framework—File-Transfer-Application
Why were you interested in this project? It is about resolving a few complicated problems that have to be solved during the project for example downloading large files and large datasets from the client’s end so this two seems similar but when it comes to the context datasets and files are a lot different so have to find own ways of achieving the tasks. Also, I have to work on extending the file api written in C in order to support the new functionality. I like what we have to achieve from the project and I look forward to it.
Bio: I am a full stack engineer pursuing master’s degree in SLIIT Sri Lanka. In the meantime, I started working on open source projects in 2018. Already I engaged with Apache Juneau, APISIX projects as a committer and PMC member). And worked for OpenMRS in 2019, 2020 GSoC projects as well as GSoD projects as well. You can visit my Github profile here.
Name: Parth Shandilya
School: The LNM Institute of Information Technology
Mentor Name: Sean Grady, Rocket Software
Project: Zowe Desktop Documentation Viewer
Why are you interested in this project? The first thing that caught my eye when I read about the project description was that it is one of the Zowe platform projects. I know Zowe provides modern interfaces and was created to host technologies that benefit the Z platform from all members of the Z community. I align with Zowe’s idea to modernize Mainframe and simplify the user experience and make the mainframe more easily accessible.
The Zowe Desktop Documentation Viewer is meant to help with core Zowe documentation viewing and could be extended to show help type documentation from apps installed in the virtual desktop. I advocate open-source software and this project helps to make sure that open-source software thrives in the world where technology is growing at a very rapid pace.
Bio: I am an undergraduate student and I have previously interned at CERN, Premiere Digital Services, and Perpule. I had the privilege of working for the open-source organization FOSSASIA as a Google Summer of Code student. I’ve contributed to other open-source projects on GitHub, such as TensorFlow Datasets, SQLAlchemy, Algorithms Python. I have given talks and presented posters at some of the very prestigious Python conferences namely PyCon US, EuroPython and PyCon Australia, and FOSSASIA Summit.
I am a highly motivated and dedicated engineer and technical writer who is passionate about writing clean, efficient code and practicing modern standards. You can find me on Twitter(https://twitter.com/ParthS0007) and GitHub(https://github.com/ParthS007). Here’s the link to my website(https://www.parthshandilya.com/)
Name: Dan Pavel Sinkovicz
School: University of Northampton, United Kingdom
Mentor’s name: Vlad Iovanov, SUSE
Project: Kube CF – Endgame Platform on Z
Why were you interested in this project? As a second year mentee for the Open Mainframe Project Mentorship program, I was excited to continue learning and growing in this industry. This year’s project is built on last year’s “Cf Operator for Kubernetes on Z” and uses the tools we made for it. I am interested in the mainframe and fascinated by its features, thus why I accepted the challenge of bringing Z in the spotlight and making it a first-class citizen by building applications specifically for s390x architecture.
Bio: I’m a tech enthusiast, eager to learn and improve as a Software Developer / Engineer. Currently, I study Software Engineering at the University of Northampton, gaining an understanding of languages such as Java, C++. PHP, Javascript, and MySQL/Oracle. I’m also building a problem-solving mind and discovering how software interacts with hardware, which is a lot of fun. During my internships at the Open Mainframe Project, I learned how to update software and make it work on a different architecture. Not only that, but it introduced me to new technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, Bash, Linux, Go, Git, Jenkins, YACC, and BOSH.
Name: Salisu Ali
School: Bayero University Kano
Mentor: Alex Kim, Vicom Infinity
Project: Zowe Parsing Engine for SMF/RMF PP Reports
Why are you interested in this project? I participated in IBM master the mainframe 2019 and challenge 15 of part 3 was about fetching information from syslog and generating point in time activity reports. While going through the proposed projects for OMP 2020 mentorship, Zowe parsing engine for SMF/RMF PP report was the last in the list but since SMF collects performance data, the project looks related to what I have done in the IBM contest. So I decided to go for it.
Bio: I am a 4th year medical student when it comes to educational background but I am very passionate about tech. Studying tech on my own dates back to 2016 when I started learning python programming through YouTube and a pdf. In 2017, I came across IBM master the mainframe. I participated in the contest and emerged one of the two winners for Africa + Middle East region. I was sponsored to an IBM conference in South Africa where I learnt a lot through meeting IBM professionals, visiting IBM head office and the presentations. I put in more effort to learn and get certified in mainframe and other fields like IoT, Machine learning and software Engineering. I like building projects on my own, especially IoT projects related to smart home and Telemedicine. I don’t have much experience with open source.
Name: Priyanshu Khandelwal
School: Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi (IIT Mandi)
Mentors: Hong Min, Jinjun Xiong, Petr Novotny from IBM
Project: Enabling IBM Z in MLModelScope
Bio: I’m a BTech Computer Science Senior at IIT Mandi who’s passionate about building softwares that have amazing real-world applications. I enjoy working on Distributed Systems, Low-Level systems, and Deep Learning. I have previously interned at several organizations, CERN, Siemens R&D, just to name a few. Working in Google Summer of Code started my journey in Open Source Development. Since then, I have contributed to many other organizations. I also co-founded an open-source organization, EinsteinPy, to tackle the challenges in general relativity. I love hanging out near mountains, rivers and exploring new places. Learn more about me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/priyanshu-khandelwal-7283b6133/
For more updates about the Mentorship program, visit https://www.openmainframeproject.org/projects/mentorship-program.
