Just want to share I was nominated as IBM Champion 2022! That’s a great recognition to receive! The last years while working in IBM, and also when I have moved to Cognizant last year, I tried to give back a bit to community about all the new things we have on Z!

I have been working with mainframe for about 13 years, that’s just a small period compared with so many incredible professionals in the area who I had the opportunity to learn with! And with so many good things happening on the cloud I looked those technologies, opportunities and found they were also on the Z Platform, we just weren’t so aware, and they brought an incredible opportunity for us mainframers on automation, on integration! So, I decided also to explore this on Z.

I have started writing some blogs on Medium (https://williampereira-80651.medium.com/) talking about Zowe, exploring its usage, also the usage of VS Code, DevOps practices, some integration between AWS and Z.

I have my channel on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/c/billpereiraz) to help other to get started with Zowe, Ansible and with the Master the Mainframe challenges at the time – now let’s think about Z Xplore for future projects!

All of these brought me a great visibility, a great opportunity to lear with the community and also help others to lear about this technology and get started. Together with Ludmila and an incredible team from IBM Z Ecosystem, help people all over world to learn about it!

This allowed me to participate in incredible events like Share and GSE UK, and now being recognized as a Champion, this makes me happy and willing to contribute even more! During this time, I have changed company and country but for sure we will see in much more online and presential meetings to learn together and share our experiences with the modern tools and open source that are every time more present on the mainframe!