I hosted an online meetup with Elizabeth K Joseph, IBM Developer Advocate on how COBOL and open source are used in modern mainframe ecosystem. The online meetup consisted of a short presentation and Q&A session. In the first part of the meetup Elizabeth covered the following:

• What do modern COBOL and mainframes look like?
• How is open source playing a major role in the modern mainframe ecosystem?
• What kinds of DevOps tools are being made available to mainframe developers?

Elizabeth is an awesome speaker. I highly encourage you to watch the replay.

In the Q&A part, she answered the following questions (when you click on Answer you will jump to that place in the video):

• Can you tell little bit more about “Master the Mainframe Program”. Can you learn a COBOL in this course? [Answer]
• How many online transactions can it [mainframe] handle? [Answer]
• How do you call back to a COBOL program? [Answer]
• Is there access to this type of machines for developers [on the cloud]? [Answer]
• Is Wazi based on zPDT? [Answer]
• As a former COBOL programmer (not IBM), is there a way to retrain and find a job in the San Francisco Bay Area? [Answer]
• How do you connect to back-end COBOL form front end? [Answer]
• Which challenges did you face when learning about IBM Z? I was surprised to learn today you were Developer Advocate / IBM Z for only about a year; you published posts and today give this presentation. I got the impression you’ve had mainframe experience for way longer [Answer]
• What are code profilers recommended for COBOL? [Answer]
• Did you meet any limitations when using COBOL? I mean something you wanted to do and you couldn’t because of COBOL? [Answer]

Elizabeth also shared the following resources to help learn about COBOL and meetup slides:

• Event slides: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dy_vI54poKVA5bubfAjHvyb3PCuBb98W/view?usp=sharing
• IBM Developer COBOL portal: https://developer.ibm.com/technologies/cobol/
• COBOL Fridays: https://developer.ibm.com/technologies/cobol/series/cobol-fridays-webinar-videos
• Open Mainframe Project COBOL Training Course: https://www.openmainframeproject.org/projects/coboltrainingcourse
• Coursera: COBOL programming with VS Code: https://www.coursera.org/learn/cobol-programming-vscode

This was a very fun online meetup and we will have Elizabeth back again.