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Blog post
My summer with COBOL - a mentee story
Summer fun with COBOL as a mentee of the Open Mainframe Project COBOL programming course
As part of this webinar series, this 2023 Q3 webinar focus is on summer mentee Ashis, as he talks to the TSC members (Sudharsana, Mike, and Hartanto) and his mentor Lezlie about the incredible achievement of integrating COBOL Check into the COBOL programming course and making it user-friendly.
Ashis ran some sample programs to demonstrate manual and automated test runs of the labs. Mike (co-chair of the COBOL course) said, "This COBOL testing is a way into the Agile landscape! This change brings in CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous development)."
Watch the following webinar to see the COBOL dream team accomplishments.
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The team started the chat with news that their sister project Zowe had over 100,000 downloads for Zowe Explorer, which was made possible by the COBOL programming course learners around the world supporting each other in the open source community.
Ashis, a third-year computer science undergraduate from India, wanted to do something different from his peers who gravitated toward web development. He took the Open Mainframe COBOL Programming course, saw that there was no chapter for testing, applied for mentorship on the Linux Foundation to work on it, and was accepted. His mentor was Lezlie Bowder, a mainframe solutionist with decades of experience.
In one summer, Ashis learned COBOL and concepts like COBOL paragraphs (which are similar to functions in Java programming), Python, and USS (UNIX compiler) for mainframe, which is similar to the Linux platform and has similar commands such as ls. He shares that learning the basics of z/OS on IBM Z Xplore and earning the Concepts badge helped him understand the VS Code/Zowe interface better and flattened his learning curve. He topped his summer off with JCL, which brought in automation to the COBOL check testing process. Being a beginner and learner himself, Ashis added a clear user-friendly process for integration. Following this process, learners can achieve unit testing using tools and IDEs that they use for any other programming language.
Ready to start your COBOL journey? Get involved! You can contribute and be part of the project COBOL Programming course.
This course is also available on IBM Digital Learning Platform and Coursera.