Earlier last week, I had the opportunity to travel to the SHARE 2018 conference held in St Louis, Missouri between August 13 and August 17. It was a great opportunity to learn about new technologies on z/OS and inform participants about our Metal C offering on z/OS.

I presented one session about Metal C, What’s in Metal for me? An overview of IBM Metal C for z/OS. The session itself was spotlighted on SHARE, meaning all participants were informed about it via email.

• The session was aimed at audiences with no experience with Metal C and for audiences that have a large HLASM code base. It was aimed to show audiences the benefits of migrate their HLASM code to Metal C.
• There were a few non-IBMer participants and I tried to target their needs during the presentation. One participant's entire code base was written in assembly and is almost 40 years old. Training new employees can take up to 6 months to get them up to speed. This was a perfect case for going to Metal C, which can leverage existing C skills without the need to understand the low level details for systems programming. 
• Slides and a description of the Metal C session are available.
• There was also another session that was held to discuss Metal C User Exits, presented by a client who has been using Metal C for a number of years now. The session gave a great history of user exit programming and some really fascinating facts about going from ASM to Metal C. Slides about Metal C User Exits are available.

I also had the opportunity to meet a lot of interesting people who shared a lot of exciting information about their open source tooling efforts, Zowe, and the future of mainframes.

So much knowledge was shared at SHARE that it can be hard to keep up. Fortunately, they have made the slides available for most presentations at the SHARE website. I encourage you to go through these presentations to learn about the current and upcoming technologies on z/OS.