I consider myself lucky to have been part of such an amazing program, The IBM Z SME mentorship, where I took a deep dive into the mainframe under the guidance of an exceptional mentor, Benjamin Thompson from IBM Australia.

    My mentor is a Z client Architect with over 28 years of experience in areas like MQ/ACE, systems programming, storage, capacity and DB2. The mentorship was designed to offer 3 hours of mentorship call over three months (Nov – Jan), but my mentor was nice to add an hour(February) of mentorship call, that’s why he’s the best. The time difference between our locations is 8 hours, my mentor gave me the opportunity to choose a time that will work for both of us and we settled on 6am my time. Well, I overslept twice, missing the 6am mark, I blame the cold weather though.

    I always like to say I know something about the mainframe, but did I know how they evolve to be the powerful, reliable and secure machines that the world transactions relied on? Well, No. Not until my mentor gave me a brief history on that and encouraged me to look up more on that, which I was glad I did. Today, I know more about how the mainframe evolved. That was basically the discussion on our first call, coupled with some tour of areas of mainframe. My mentor gave me the freedom to select what area I will like to know in details for the next call, I chose DevOps.

    It was fascinating how the mainframe has evolved to allow developers code and pushed their work to a version control system like GitHub. This is a side of the Z/OS I haven’t seen before, it looks cool. I thought ISPF interface is all I have when it comes to writing code on Z/OS, but IBM IDz has been there for quite a while. With this tool, I can write code comfortably like I do on my PC. Another option I have is ZOWE, a tool used by IBM Z Xplore. I was lucky to also witness some maintenance on the mainframe during the second call. I came to know what APAR and PTFs are in terms of IBM products.

     The third call was about message queue (MQ). Because I’m a beneficiary of IBM cloud free tier account, I once use MQTT on IBM cloud without knowing it is just IBM MQ, with double T’s at the end J.  My mentor explained this in detail during the third call and also took me through SMP/E. we also discussed about data sets, with emphasis on VSAM and GDG datasets, since they are the ones I knew little or nothing about.

     The fourth call was about RMF/SMF and IBM zWIN. In my Open Mainframe Project internship, I worked on a project that convert RMF XML to JSON through DDS. This project is not getting the raw data from the mainframe but rather, interacting with a third party tool from Broadcom. My mentor took me through the raw RMF data on the mainframe, the first time I ever saw that data. He also took me through SMF data collection, dumping and analyzing the data. This process was demonstrated through the use of IBM zWIN.

     For the past four month, I can proudly say I took a deep, no, deeper dive into the mainframe. I’ve learnt new things and get to better understand some tools I have used previously.  All this will not have been possible without @SUDHARSANA SRINIVASAN  and Shooting Stars Foundation. A big shout-out to them.

Thanks alot!​​