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I'm thrilled to announce the launch of this year's Master the Mainframe contest, run by IBM. It's our sixteenth year doing this, and it's grown from a small skunkworks project to a massive worldwide thing, attracting over 25,000 contestants last year. I'll also proudly point out that we've had a number of goon winners over the years, and now that we've launched and have worked out most of the opening-day jitters, I'm here to let you fine folks know about it. So yes, mainframes. They're just big computers. This is a fully-configured z15, which is actually four 19" racks connected to one another. https://twitter.com/heather_perrin/status/1172267048480755713 Behind those doors sit up to 190 processor cores, 40TB of redundantly-configured memory, an ungodly amount of PCIe interconnects, some crazy high-precision oscillators and power supplies, and more plumbing than your average house. (not me in photo) This year, I'm in charge of writing the challenges and building some of the behind-the-scenes support code, so the whole thing is a bit different than previous years. Before I get too much further, I'll also point out that this is No Experience Necessary. If you can navigate these forums, you can follow the challenges. We tell you everything you need to do to get started, and the difficulty ramps up as you finish the challenges. Those challenges? We give you a mainframe ID and you do a bunch of stuff. Creating files, running programs, fixing problems. You get into the mainframe-specific stuff like JCL, Data Sets, MVS commands, Rexx, and of course COBOL, but you also get into Python, a lot of UNIX stuff, there's some Docker and Ansible as well, and you do most of it through VS Code, so no 3270 terminal (unless you really want to... it's on port 623, have fun) Think of it like a big obstacle course running on a mainframe that we set up just for this. If you're a student, you can win prizes (mostly money because we can't send anybody anywhere), and anybody can win Acclaim badges for finishing main portions of the contest. You get until the end of the year to make your mark, and besides the sheer thrill of writing JCL and winning prizes, there are lots of employers who ask us for the Level 2/3 winners every year, so there's that too. Sign up through https://masterthemainframe.com Please feel free to message me with any questions CLAM DOWN said it's ok for me to post this, and I hope they still feel this way an AOL chatroom fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Sep 17, 2020 |
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Sep 17, 2020 19:36
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duck monster posted:Oh boy, I've been looking for an opportunity to get back into writing COBOL after all these decades. Also sometimes I yearn for the sweet embrace of death. This duck monster speaks the truth. Someone from these very forums pulled this off: https://twitter.com/mainframed767/status/1301888504373207041 To be clear, he's mocking this guy: https://twitter.com/brianroemmele/status/1257832168455208963?lang=en who got a little ahead of himself, but is still an enlightening read
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Sep 18, 2020 14:55
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Phone posted:Oh hey, I remember doing this years ago. I only did the part that got me a tshirt, but I put it in my resume and got a job writing COBOL. heck yeah! It's the first time in years we haven't had to spend every minute telling people how to make their Function keys work, that they can't just click on ISPF options, how to remap their keyboard to get insert/enter/backspace, or why they can't resize their window. It's not a 1:1 replacement for ISPF, there's still a lot of things you need that for, but this was the year to change the environment. 
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Sep 19, 2020 13:07
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Astroid posted:God, I really need to go through master the mainframe this year. I tapatap COBOL on VMS but got into it to work on IBM systems. Nice. COBOL is definitely a language that does not mess around. I know enough of it to respect it, and seeing what the pros can do with very few lines of code is quite amazing. Let me know if I can help with anything if you attempt it again this year. SamDabbers posted:I participated in this contest a couple times when I was in school and got some cool t-shirts. Now I am a mainframe janitor and it's the best IT job I've had so far.  The curve is steep, but the view is nice. Did you get the Dark Side of the Mainframe shirt? That was my personal favorite Three Mainframe Moon was a good one too 
an AOL chatroom fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Sep 30, 2020 |
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Sep 30, 2020 15:06
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Hughmoris posted:At a high level, what kind of questions/problems do you work through in this contest? Sorry I didn't see this earlier. In order, you download vscode and install the mainframe plugins to get connected to our system. Then you do some stuff with files (data sets and members), run some jobs and look at the output (JCL), and then log into the UNIX side of things to touch things from the command line. Then it gets into some more modern methods of touching files with ZOUA through Python. That's the first half of it. From there, you start loading and managing data into a VSAM data set (kind of a hybrid file/database construct) using a command line utility (Zowe CLI), write some stuff in REXX (an amazing scripting language), some other stuff in COBOL (nowhere near as difficult as people make it out to be), and then do a whole bunch of stuff with Ansible. The final grand challenge is mostly open-ended. You pick something from what you saw and build something of your own. If you hand in *anything*, you finish Level 3 and get that badge. If you're a student and create something amazing, you're eligible to win the grand challenge and get fame and fortune.
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Oct 9, 2020 01:47
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Hughmoris posted:Awesome, thanks for the write up. These days, I’ve seen most hires happen with minimal education beforehand. They get hired and then get a few months of training. For education, I really like the Z Trials demos because they give your a real live (emulated) mainframe and some instructions to see how the products work. They only last like 3-5 days, but it’s a full system and you can re-request the system if you want to try again. https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/software-trials There’s a course on Coursera (taught by me!) that’s alright, but needs an update. It’s also not free.
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Oct 10, 2020 04:20
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adaz posted:This is really cool going to share internally and with some girls code groups i'm on. Yes!! Thank you, and let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. I have many strings to pull. Please don’t hesitate to ask. I love the Z trials, I only wish they lasted a bit longer.
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Oct 18, 2020 04:34
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Phone posted:That said, 88 levels rule and is probably one of my favorite features of COBOL. Yes! It's such a bizarre thing, but SO freaking useful
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Oct 28, 2020 00:06
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dead gay comedy forums posted:holy poo poo there is a vscode extension to work with now? Yup! It's not a panacea, though, there's a lot of ISPF/SDSF stuff that you can't get to through the extension. We went with the VSCode extension this year because there have been big advances in what you *can* do with it, but realtalk, to run the contest, we have to provide a method for 25k contestants around the world to connect. The lone free Mac 3270 client, tn3270, depended on the Carbon framework to run in a mixed 32/64-bit mode, and the OS is 64-bit only now. Ideally, we'd be able to introduce people to the platform using vscode, and then bring in 3270 for more advanced topics, since that's what people will be using in their jobs, it's just a matter of how to make that happen in a way that doesn't result in doing PC tech support for half of the people. You can also connect to the current MTM using 3270, it's on port 623, same IP and credentials. dead gay comedy forums posted:I did the 2019 edition to start learning about mainframes after I had a chat with one of my professors about it, and there is something really appealing for me about mainframes which I think is similar to how trucks are appealing to some drivers hahaha Having the skills is definitely a differentiation. There are companies looking to hire fresh-faced mainframers (which hasn't always been the case) and Master the Mainframe has always been a good measurement of how interested/capable people are in the platform. I'd suggest researching any role's trajectory, though. I've seen positions that were basically "Bill is the only person who knows how to keep everything running, Bill is retiring, we need a new Bill", and unless you're super-skilled and getting huge bucks, seems like a good way to get depressed. Make sure you're looking at jobs where you're part of a team, and that there's a strategic direction forward for the mainframe platform. I'd say two months of "an hour or two every night" working your way through an online course, book, or set of tutorials about the core pillars (CICS, IMS, z/OS, RACF, SMP/E) will give you more than enough to let an employer know you're serious.
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Jan 21, 2021 17:52
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