In this episode of the “I Am a Mainframer” podcast, guest host Donna Hudi, CMO of Phoenix Software International, chats with Fernando Rijo Cedeno, a research and development engineer at Broadcom. Fernando reflects on his roots in the Dominican Republic and how his Hispanic heritage has influenced his work in the mainframe community. As a Zowe CLI squad leader, he led efforts to make Zowe’s tools multilingual, increasing accessibility for non-English speakers.
Fernando shares his passion for the mainframe community and his vision for its future, highlighting the role of open-source initiatives like Zowe in driving growth and modernization. He encourages everyone, regardless of their language background, to get involved in the mainframe ecosystem.
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Transcript:
Announcer:
This is the I Am a Mainframer podcast, brought to you by the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project. Episodes explore the careers of mainframe professionals and offer insights into the industry and technology. Now, your host, Senior Analyst and Vice President of Sales and Business Development at Futurum Research, Steven Dickens.
Donna Hudi:
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the I Am a Mainframer podcast. I’m your guest host today, Donna Hudi. And today we’re not only going to introduce you to yet another amazing mainframer, but we’re celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month. Hispanic Heritage Month is a time to pay tribute to the generations of Hispanic Americans who’ve positively influenced and enriched our nation and society. Today I’m joined by Fernando Rijo Cedeno from Broadcom. And while this is my first time meeting Fernando, I hear that not only is he proud of his Hispanic heritage, but he’s done a great deal within the mainframe community to not only influence it, but also enrich it. And I’m looking forward to hearing about that today. So, hi Fernando, welcome to the show.
Fernando Rijo Cedeno:
Thank you. Thank you very much, Donna, for having me, and thanks for the opportunity.
Donna Hudi:
Absolutely. So let’s dive right in and why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you do, or tell us a little bit about you and what you do at Broadcom and your role as a research and development engineer.
Fernando Rijo Cedeno:
Alright. If I may go back just to sort of the roots. Born and raised in the Dominican Republic. I moved to the US around, say 10 or so years ago. Did the last two years of college, and got through the whole experience of mainframe, found this company at a career fair where they were talking about just a lot of the old computers and whatnot. At the time though, I was just a green card holder, basically a permanent resident basically. And what was interesting to me is that in that career fair at Penn State, it was a lot of very big government jobs, like CIA, FBI, NSA. I’m like, that would be cool, that’s what you see in the movies, right? But I couldn’t apply for that. The first thing they looked for was US citizenship. So I’m like, yeah, I can definitely understand that.
But there was this other booth that was kind of empty. I’m like, yeah, let’s check them out. It was CA Technologies at the time. And I got to meet, I didn’t know it then, but one of my mentors basically, Jason Tucker, he definitely helped a lot with a lot of the mainframe concepts and just me developing my career. Even to this day, I kind of work with them here and there. And to not make a whole long story short here, is the idea that I came to know mainframe first with the movies, kind of the cliche Matrix, like, “Yes, let’s hack into the mainframe” right? But once you start getting into it and some of the nuances of the operating system itself, you fall in love with it. And to answer your question too, sorry for derailing, what I do today here at Broadcom, I participate, I’m part of the open source Zowe project under the Open Mainframe project. And what I do is mostly on the Zowe CLI client terminal, and Zowe Explorer, which is just a VS code extension. Just interacting, modernizing basically how people interact with the mainframe. As we may all know, right, it’s all the 3270 panels and whatnot, right? Some of those old green screens that we just been living with for the longest time, like 50 to 60 years ago. But yeah, that’s what I’m doing here now.
Donna Hudi:
Well, that’s great. I hear that you are actually a Zowe CLI squad leader, which I think is very impressive. And maybe we’ll drill into that a little bit more in a minute, but one of the things I wanted to focus on a little bit more, you said you’re originally from the Dominican Republic. With one of our focuses today being Hispanic Heritage Month, can you tell me a little bit about your heritage and how it might influence you in your life today, and the role that you have within Broadcom and the mainframe community as a whole?
Fernando Rijo Cedeno:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I guess to me personally, English is my second language, definitely born and raised with Hispanic culture as well. Coming from the Caribbean, from the food, the music, it’s all different. So there was some adjusting, but once you get into the groove of, oh yeah, this is how the mainframe works and whatnot. What’s important to me is to make it accessible to people that English is not their first language. And with the CLI, I had the opportunity basically to be a squad lead for say, about almost two years. And the opportunity that I had was kind of focused on making sure that it was accessible to people that English is not their first language. Because usually when you learn to program, it’s all English based, English focused. But me speaking Spanish, I wanted to just make sure that the things that we were working on from every little thing that we put out on the screens or on the terminal, that people would be able to see it or read it basically in their own languages, not just Spanish, but say you came from a French background, what was resonated with me that I was able to contribute that back to the community, not just Mainframe itself, but in general I had that opportunity there.
Donna Hudi:
I mean, that’s really great. So I heard someone say the other day about understanding and remembering that they’re a part of something that’s much larger than they are. And the fact that you’re thinking about something like that, you’re thinking about how do I make this system more accessible to people whose first language isn’t English? That’s pretty, pretty brilliant, if you will. So I applaud you for that. I hear that you’ve been quite involved in going to conferences like SHARE and the open source summits and things like that. Have you had much opportunity to really get yourself immersed in the community? And if so, what do you enjoy about that?
Fernando Rijo Cedeno:
It might sound super cliche, honestly, but what I enjoy the most about the community, about the whole idea of being able to have the mainframe behave as another platform in open source, really is the people. And I’ve been super fortunate because at the beginning, people kind of believed in me, regardless of my background and whatnot. They saw something in me like the skill and whatnot. But once you start getting to know the community, once you start contributing to something that honestly, you can’t really put it into words, because it’s just so much bigger, and people are depending on this technology, and just being able to put that little bits and pieces together to help the community is what keeps me going every day. At times, there’s way too many things that we juggle. There’s always internal stuff. At the end of the day, I also, I work for Broadcom, right?
It’s not all open source, and it’s not all just that, but also have to keep that in mind, and that is sort of the thing that I look for the most pretty much every day, is having the opportunity to contribute and receive contributions literally from anyone. And at times, even, for example, in a conference, I think I got to meet a couple of people that I’ve interacted with, customers too, that I usually just chat with in GitHub, Slack, Google Chat, some of the internal channels, external channels, and have them tell you, thanks for this feature, thanks for that feature. You’re like, wow. You get to see the people that you get to touch through the code and whatnot. So that’s kind of what I like the most about being able to go to conferences. Definitely.
Donna Hudi:
So you had this thought when you knew before you got involved in the mainframe, right? Matrix, and that’s all you knew about the mainframe, right? I have a son who’s a software architect, and I say mainframe to him and he’s like, “Oh, Mom.” And in college, I asked him, I said, what did they teach you about the mainframe? He’s like, oh, Mom, it was a one hour lecture in the history of programming languages, and that was it. And so I’ve yet to be able to change his mind, but I wonder how has your mind changed over the time that you’ve been involved? What did you think about the mainframe back then versus what did you think about now and how much of it was true or not like what you thought?
Fernando Rijo Cedeno:
That’s interesting. For example, back in the Dominican Republic, I had a chance to go to one of those, bring your kids to work day or something similar that they used to do. My Dad used to work at a telecommunications company back there, and my mom as well, they both took me there. I saw the big server rooms. I don’t know how they had access to that, but I’m very glad that they did. I saw all those red and green blinking lights, and I’m like, huh, I wonder though, how did that connect to the video games that I play and that kind of stuff, or the movies, because you hear, “Let’s hack into the mainframe”, is there someone that’s going to come into this specific room and connect to some random board or whatever?
That’s sort of the idea that I had. But then starting in around the second year of sophomore, yeah, second year of college, I started seeing programming and sort of understanding the backgrounds, the ins and outs of the computer, even though I had some experiences with it, just installing video games and whatnot, mostly boring tutorials. That’s been a passion, just making sure that I understand how it works, what I can do with it, what I can make it do but then trying to connect it into mainframe. My first year, definitely appreciative of the training that I got, because I came in, they told me, yes, you’re going to be working with mainframe. And there was, they called it the ASE Training Associate Software Engineer training, where they taught you the ins and outs, how to connect to ISPF, some of the panels and whatnot.
And as I got more into sort of modifying panels here and there, just putting say this input field here in the bottom right corner, whatnot, just modifying the panels on the 3270, I got to understand more and more how the years in college and some of the basic history of programming connects to what people are used to do at banks and whatnot. And I think by the end of the first year though, that interests me so much that the panels and stuff, I was able to not only modify them from a graphical perspective, but even manage a few of the systems or LPARs, logical partitions that our own developers and myself used to use for the networking product. I think it’s called Net Master. But yeah, I got to do a lot of that, and that’s where it clicked for me. Yes, it’s all nice, and yeah, you can get into a terminal, you can control the whole computer, but it’s a different story when we’re talking about millions of transactions, we’re talking about the workload and being able to see that and test it on a smaller scale on different LPARs. That was kind of what kind of clicked for me. And I had the opportunity back there to follow another great mentor of mine, Rob. He came from Australia, so definitely people from different backgrounds. But yeah, I got to know him and he taught me the ropes, and here I’m still doing mainframe stuff.
Donna Hudi:
So now expand upon that a little bit, right? And take us into the land of open source. So you go from working on 3270 screens, ISPF panels, and then you become the Zowe CLI squad lead, right? That’s open source, right? So that’s different. It’s on the mainframe, but it is open source nonetheless. So how did you make that transition and how did that change any of your opinions or your thought processes?
Fernando Rijo Cedeno:
In my opinion, honestly, Zowe in general, I think is probably one of the best things that happened to the mainframe because we’re not just the modernization theme and whatnot, but the idea of making sure that people right out of college could literally start writing code, contributing back to the platform. That was kind of the powerful thing for me. And so the transition, it was first I started with the networking product, moved on to a databases product, but then someone else on a similar graphical user interface for the mainframe on a different team, Chris, Jason, the same Jason that I mentioned, and Dan, they had this idea of being able to run commands, make sure that you can do everything you can do in the panels, just do it on your terminal, on your pc, on your laptop. And when the idea was conceptualized, it was all good for an internal tool that yes, it is nice for developers and whatnot, but then the company started seeing some value in it and it was donated. We had the opportunity to get to know some people, not myself, but product management had the opportunity to discuss with, I think a couple chairs, with the open mainframe and Linux Foundation. And yeah, that’s how the whole idea of Zowe came about. I think it was probably six years ago now where everything started coming together in different companies. IBM, Rocket, CA Technologies-Broadcom now, started coming together and contributing different pieces of code, different functionality, and more and more features came together. More and more customers were seeing value in open source, because at first we got to say this, because open source wasn’t necessarily considered the most secure thing. It is the code that everyone can see it.
But really the fact that everyone can see it kind of makes it more secure, because you’re forced to make the code good enough so that people are not intentionally trying to break it, trying to break into it, trying to hack the mainframe, so to speak. But yeah, that’s how it all morphs together, how this product came about. There was some conversations at a product management level, and I had the opportunity to make sure that that CLI tool, that client terminal interface was able to surface as one of the main DevOps inhibitor, enablers basically, because it allowed for writing scripts, automating things, whether that was, say, shutting down IPL in the system, bringing it back up. You had to perform very specific steps, and it was probably kind of like a tedious process. So the fact that we kind of enabled people internally first at Broadcom to do all that with a script, they hit a button, that kind of resonated with different people. And as it grew or took a little more traction, it evolved into now what we know like CLI and different other products, Zowe desktop, and many, many more. I could say great things about the other products. Definitely I love the CLI because that’s the one that I started with and has a special place in my heart. But a lot of other great products out there are coming from Zowe.
Donna Hudi:
So now I’m going to ask you a two-part question and I’ll purposely separate them. What is the one thing that you’re most proud of as it relates to Zowe?
Fernando Rijo Cedeno:
The most proud of? I think not just the traction, but the people that we’ve been able to reach and the minds of the customers that we’ve been able to change. Because again, it was hard at first to sell the idea like, oh yeah, you could use this open source tool, and when people heard open source, that was a red flag. But now it’s a different story. I know it took about five years and not or whatnot, but I think that’s what I’m the most proud of, not just about the CLI itself, but about Zowe as a whole, right? We’ve been able to make open source relate to mainframe now. I think that it can go together with mainframe. Not like, oh, this is not secure, we can’t have it on the mainframe. I think what I’m most proud of.
Donna Hudi:
Okay. Now let’s look at the other side of that. Is there anything that’s been done from a Zowe perspective that you may regret and think should be undone or done differently?
Fernando Rijo Cedeno:
Wow, definitely there’s a lot of pain points that I can mention here. I think the one that resonates with the most people is configuration. And that’s always been hard. Whenever there is a product that needs to be installed, you got to make sure that the right authorizations, the right people, the right users, are authorized to access the right resources and whatnot. So in general, even for our client tool, like the CLI, Zowe Explorer, that’s been a little hard because at the beginning there wasn’t the idea of being able to share those configurations with your team. It was mostly for system administrators. That was kind of the focus initially. So we have this concept of profiles where it was all on your one machine or one PC, and we couldn’t make them share that with someone else. But now I would probably go back in time and undo that because the way we’re doing things now today, it’s a lot more shareable, a lot more like plug and play. We can literally give you a file and within a couple seconds you can start running commands. You can start interacting with the mainframe on your VS code extensions, right, on your VS code windows. I think that’s the one thing I will probably look back into and if I could go to the past, “Hey, make sure that profiles can be shared.” But yeah, that’s the one thing that I would probably be into.
Donna Hudi:
Well, I know that V3 of Zowe launched earlier this week, and I think that that profile change is one of the big things coming out in V3, so they finally got there.
Fernando Rijo Cedeno:
Definitely. We’re in a way better place now.
Donna Hudi:
So now I’m going to ask you another question here. Let’s say if you had one wish for the mainframe community and you had a magic wand and you could make it happen, what would that be?
Fernando Rijo Cedeno:
One wish. I think to me, the one thing that I would want to do with that wish would be to make people continue to do what they do. I know it sounds kind of weird, but it’s not that it’s the perfect thing and people should all work for mainframe, but once you get to know the people that work on the mainframe, you never kind of want to leave. So if I could, I definitely want to put it in people’s brains that they should keep doing what they’re doing because it’s working. For the people that come into mainframe, rarely do they want to leave. So I think that would be my one wish.
Donna Hudi:
Okay. I don’t disagree with you. I came over 10 years ago from the distributed side, and I’m not leaving. They’re not getting rid of me yet.
I sent you a question yesterday and you sent me back just a little while ago, two responses to that question. And I really love the first response that you sent to me. The question was, what do you want people watching to remember about you? You came back with two responses. The first one I’m going to say is that you said it was in the context of when you’re no longer around then you wanted people to remember you for the qualities of a servant leader, which I think is an amazing answer.
Fernando Rijo Cedeno:
Thank you. Thank you.
Donna Hudi:
Tell me what that means.
Fernando Rijo Cedeno:
To me. That’s someone that is able to not just serve, as the word says, right, but put people first. If you’re leading the team, make sure that it’s not about you. It’s about making sure that your team does its best, what they feel comfortable with doing, what they excel at the most. Making sure that that service part is there. Empathy, making sure that you understand other people’s problems because it is hard to first explain your own problems, understand your own problems, but at times you have to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. You cannot expect people to respect you if you don’t respect them. Those are kind of the three main pillars that I take from when I say servant leader. First, make sure that the people that surround you excel. Second, make sure that you can relate to what they’re going through. And third, do it with respect.
Donna Hudi:
Okay. That’s an amazing answer. Okay, so as we’re looking to maybe wrap this up now, there’s two questions that we always ask everybody. And when I ask you the first one, I want you to think about the second answer you gave me earlier, because I think that it’ll play into this. But that question is if you could go back to the start of your career and tell your younger self, one thing I know, as Steven likes to say, if you’ve seen Back to the Future, you would get your own DeLorean, you get to go back. What would be that one thing you would tell your younger self?
Fernando Rijo Cedeno:
I was thinking about the question, and when I first saw the question, I thought to make a joke here, like, “Hey, don’t sell any stock”. But to me, just make sure that the one thing that I’ll say to myself is make sure that people get to know you for someone that loves what they do, not just on a professional level, because I don’t feel like I work, I feel it’s just, I kind of like it, it doesn’t feel like, oh, I have to go to work now. But the people as well, the people around me, to make sure that they know it, because it’s not just about you. You are defined basically by the people that surround you. So to me, it’s about loving what I do and making sure that the people around me sort of feel that same passion as well.
Donna Hudi:
So I love that. I have a coworker here who repeatedly says, and he’s quoting somebody, and I’m not even going to try to remember who it is, but he repeatedly says that if you find a career that you love, you never actually work a day in your life. And I firmly agree with that. I would also say that he has another quote that he’s very fond of that comes from Ronald Reagan that has something to do about not caring who gets credit for what. I’m summarizing, he’s going to yell at me for that later. But that’s also very true, and that leads back to what you were talking about with the empathy and with the teams and things like that and making sure that everybody’s heard and all of those things which are really important. Okay, so the last question is, if you had a crystal ball, so now we’ve gotten out of the DeLorean and now we’re getting our crystal ball out. You had a magic wand earlier, so you’re going the whole gambit. So if you had a crystal ball and you could look into the future, where do you see the mainframe technology in five years?
Fernando Rijo Cedeno:
First of all, not dead because there is so much that people don’t realize what mainframe touches from just buying something online to going to do groceries. You might even hear stories, if you search on the internet, that some companies started moving their workload back into mainframe. So I can definitely see the platform 10 times better than what it’s now. And with Zowe and Open Mainframe, a shameless plug there because I definitely do love Zowe, and we might get a lot more people contributing to the platform and making it better.
Donna Hudi:
Okay. So if you had any closing thoughts for our listeners on that topic, what would they be?
Fernando Rijo Cedeno:
I guess one thing I would like to leave people with is that, first it sounds cliche, but be true to yourself. Believe in yourself. Just make sure that you don’t work a day in your life. Try to do something that you like. And when it comes to the platform, definitely think about contributing, because now that being open source, you can read the code, you can contribute documentation, you can contribute translations. We’re definitely trying to make sure that that’s out there. So if you’re hearing this and English is not your first language, pretty please consider contributing translations.
Donna Hudi:
That’s great. All right. Well, thank you, Fernando. This has been a fantastic conversation. I know I’ve learned a lot about you, and I certainly feel richer for it. I really appreciate you coming on and spending the time and telling us a little bit about your story. So you’ve been listening to the I am a Mainframer podcast. I’m your guest host, Donna Hudi. Please click to subscribe and share with your friends within the community, and we’ll see you on the next episode. Thank you for watching.
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