 Oh, we're live. Hey, hey, buddy. Thanks. Sorry. I've been counted in there. I was waiting for the number one great So thanks everyone. I think about 25 minutes and this is my presentation called how project Zoe is opening up the mainframe the mainframe This is a Linux conference Linux foundation a lot of open source It's probably a little bit weird to see mainframeers pitching up here made people don't often think of the mainframe as a open platform so I I am just apologies if I don't operate this. Let me hit the next button Cool. Okay. So this picture means put in my family. I'm on the right the left of the picture when you're looking at it Anyway, um, and that is my there's my lovely family Oh The the sort of teenager the kind of 19 year old with the sort of he's got more hair than me Although I used to when I was that age anyway, um That's my son Jared and like all parents or teenagers, you know, I was a teenager once So I know it's hard being a teenager and I have a Teenage son. So, uh, you know, you have that kind of father-teenage relationship where it's kind of a little bit standoff It's he's quite an upturnal tends to sort of stay awake At night and sleep in the daytime and things like that. So but there's one one thing that he and I both enjoy We both enjoy movies. We both enjoy superhero movies and Japanese anime and so forth and there's a fabulous movie it came out in 2018 It's called spider-man into the spider burst. So people haven't watched it cracking film The basic backstory for the film Somebody gets bitten by spider. They turn into the spider-man. It's not your typical spider-man story It's actually I won't reveal too much about it. But if you look at this particular scene here the spider-man You know kid growing up having to prove he's worthy of being the new spider-man That's actually him on the very left of this picture as you're looking at it It's called Miles Morales. He meets other spider people from other universes And there's a point in the movie most movies have a bit called the hero's journey Where the hero has to challenge and prove that he's worthy to be to be the hero in the movie anyway So Miles Morales has been challenged by all these other spider people As to whether he's he's he's able to and he's got some doubt within himself And he's kind of in his basement of his auntie and stuff like that And they're all throwing lines at them. There's a wonderful line that Penny Parker who's one of the spider people throws at him And I was watching this movie with my son and we were just sitting eating popcorn You know, we hadn't mentioned pretty much a word to each other and the line in the movie where they're all throwing challenges They're saying, you know, can he jump to walls? Can you do backflips? Can you you know, can you fight evil baddies and nine dimensions? They say Penny Parker says can you rewrite a mainframe while being shot at? And I love that line Because it kind of shows that First of all, if you know anything about mainframes You're worthy of being a superhero because I have this kind of mystique of being incredibly difficult hard to operate Um, and also I love it because my son at that point he turned to me and he said that Can you were our mainframe we're being shot at and I had this just for about five seconds I had this really cool connection where He thought that I was kind of like a superhero because I worked on mainframes Anyway, but it made me realize it made me think Um, my son doesn't know a lot about mainframes. A lot of people don't know a lot about mainframes So that kind of leads me into where to where I thought I'd kick off this talk So a little bit about some mainframe trivia here. I won't repeat it all for you I'm not here to sell you a mainframe, but the most interesting thing for me about mainframes I personally work on mainframes and open source Um, it's a bottom line most people working on a mainframe have never seen one and that's true today I meet people who work on mainframe computers and have worked on them for perhaps 30 years Fabulous careers never tiring Some of some and now and I say to them When was the last time you actually saw a mainframe apart from perhaps being in a trade show or you know on a video or something Have you ever seen your company's mainframe and the answer is no they probably haven't or it's like the other side of the world Perhaps in a you know, or even if it's in their office. It's in some data center in a basement or something anyway, so It's incredibly it's a computer platform. That's still quite Unfamiliar to us. We haven't often seen it. So for the next picture um The vision that a lot of people have on mainframe computers is kind of like the left hand picture It's sort of black. It's white. It's got tape decks people see it through hollywood movies This is my son's percepts of the mainframe and penny parkers if there's kind of sort of superhero test platform It's actually a fairly modern machine. It's it's a thing on the right hand side um Sometimes the mainframe often people say obviously it's old. Yeah, it's old. It's been around for 55 60 years, but Porsche 911 target. Um, that's not an old car. It's been around for the same amount of time. Okay. Um My current car is actually an old car. It's actually I just got a 12 year old car But the ultimate bill engine has been around for what 100 years or something like that. So, um, so When you when when technology started Obviously things move on the world moves on, you know engines get better the Porsche 911 gets better and the mainframe gets better So so one of the reasons this kind of perception of age really comes from the fact that people haven't seen it They haven't seen what the modern mainframe is like the modern mainframe has a lot of open source running on it And that's where I get to with this was taught project Sorry A lot of people when they see the mainframe when they picture it they picture this which is a bunch of green screen, you know a little bit of red and blue on here It's a very sort of text based interface and So some people I know who work on the mainframe. This is actually what scares them away from it Because it's obviously it's not modern. It's not drag and drop. It doesn't have gooey's it doesn't have Help text it doesn't have rich graphics and stuff like that. So sometimes people Date it based upon How it looks okay, which is very true as well Right if you if you look at some a building or or anything like that or piece of music or something often You date it by by how it looks or how it sounds. Okay, doesn't internally mean that it's still it's all an old system Okay, so one of the interesting things my background when I grew up I grew up kind of I was kind of like a sort of 70 80s kid, you know, I graduated from university in about 1988 um and at the time um A little bit of animation on this slide uh folks This is a pretty simple os2 os2 warp um os2 warp and this is windows 3.1 on the bottom right hand side And even if mainframe is great technology being great technology Doesn't win often sucky technology and windows 3.1 was sucky technology at the time It was technically inferior. It wasn't 32 bit multitasking. It wasn't protective memory. It was crash. Yadda yadda yadda It won the war and it made microsoft Phenomenal companies that they are now they're a huge company and are actually very active and open source as well So i'm not attacking them as a company, but at the time this was at the inferior platform one and history is riddled with that even if you look at Uh tv shows right now reality tv shows, you know, um the people who come second or third In singing talent shows often become go on to become the the best stars and often people don't remember Um, you know, perhaps a person who had the best voice or something um, sometimes technology really is a popularity contest and The reason i believe at the time when i was i University i had a choice between using one of these two platforms in my heart I knew that os2 was a superior platform Um, but i tend i became a windows developer But actually for the first 12 years of my career And one of the reasons was because as a developer it was a very welcoming community There's a lot i could do on microsoft windows. It had a developer program. There were lots of apps on it It ran games, you know, i could i could you know, it was it was a more welcoming And ultimately the number of games on the platform the amount of software you've got is what makes your platform successful And this story is as old as time. I've got a picture of vhs versus beta max. It doesn't matter what generation you're in I've got um Games consult here. I've even got coffee pods on the right right the coffee pod There's this coffee pod forwards going right now between the espresso or currid I tend to add an espresso coffee maker. I like to drink coffee the coffee I like to drink comes in the espresso pods ego. I buy an espresso coffee maker People tell me it's not as good as the other one. I don't care. It makes the coffee I like the games I like to play and the videos back in the 1980s 1990s when I was watching videos I were available on vhs cassette. So I had a vhs player. Okay You've got to have the platform You've got to have people building stuff for your tech for you to be successful Okay, this brings me up to linux foundation. Most people here should know about linux foundation. It's a linux foundation Or open source summit conference. It runs ton of very cool enterprise software that's ultimately Open source Jenkins no and we have the zoe logo here in the bottom left of that kind of northeast pile And zoe is an open source project owned and managed by the linux foundation Little bit of background. We have a wikipedia page. Um, we're about um, just a little over two years old And if I look at the timeline Just coming up recently we Created what is known as an active long term support release people who work on node will be familiar with that It means we're kind of stabilized and we're a little bit settled Which sort of happened in about march and there was a press release just I think last week ago So our first year of kind of growing up, you know, when we're in some diapers kind of burping You know calling around really trying to get ready that was last year We added a lot of stuff in now and now we're ready to be sort of enterprise I'm going to cover a quite a bit of speed just because I only have About 25 minutes for this talk some of the key points about what we have within zoe um first thing Everybody should remember I actually personally worked for IBM IBM pays my salary, but um, I worked for IBM For Zoe which is owned and managed by the linux foundation. Um open mainframe project. It is an open source Um open source, you know, collaboration all of our meetings are open Uh, we have elections to various, um groups called the zoe leadership committee, which unfortunately be part of You know, we don't do things in private and secret So as an IBMer that feels quite odd sometimes because at IBM we used to do lots of things It's kind of in private and secret. Um before we announced it That's not how things work with our open source. Um, we create releases once a month. We're continuous integration So if there's something that people don't like, um And they can get to that some slack and get look at all of our source code Join any meeting they want to look at all of our issues Um, uh, we may have a fix within a month. Um for for issues So we tend to be quite nice continuous integration continuous delivery And I think our customers tend to like that for something that they raise We tend to fix it quite early on First we have a number of components. I'm going to rattle through them quite a bit at speed The first component we have is called the zoe explorer The zoe explorer for both uh, first you use vs code And these are studio code. Um, it's a plugin for vs code And if you think back to my initial, um saying about, you know, sometimes people take the mainframes old because it has this kind of You know, very gash jarring sort of green screen. Um You can go into, um, uh vs code. Uh, you just go into an extensions with a little tab on the On the bar on the left click zoe explorer download it and install it and Barely quickly within, you know, followed instructions. You're looking at this So rather than that slide 16, let me just go back and I'm gonna do a kind of Double click. Yeah, it worked for me. Boom. This is this is your 55 year old mainframe And there are still customers who who operate the mainframe like this and enjoy it, but I work with folks who are, uh, you know, actually, uh, youngest of my youngest son, right? The youngest of my 19 year old I was watching the uh, the spider-man movie with They basically don't don't want to use this right, you know Every generation wants to use the tech that they grew up with especially because that's three years in a kombsky course Learning uh vs code and vs code is great for node get integration Phenomenal phenomenal product, you know, this is a more familiar environment and you can actually achieve Uh, the same level of functionality, you know, you can work with a file system and you can submit jobs and do various So and so forth things. This is a very important piece of dough called the zerry explorer okay, um I'm just gonna fuss. Yeah, well, there are other plugins as well. Zerry is a community So the zerry explorer has a plugin that's I think called the IBM z open editor. There's something called hcl tools Thinking back to my analogy about phs versus beta max or the coffee pods It's not good enough to just have like you've got to have a thing that other people want to extend and expand The specific squad within zoe. It's just got created recently which shows kind of how dynamic zoe is That's really about trying to create it. So there are plugins to the zerry explorer itself. So again, even though it's open source It's not a closed box that only we manage The omp manager so you can plug in very successful a little story. I'm going to tell I'm just keeping an eye on the time um Most of us are you know stuck at home, right with a pandemic Obviously, uh, you know depending on where you are following different sort of lockdown rules and stuff So I'm at home at the moment. Um, one of the things about the kobi 19 pandemic is that We've got animation on the slideshow. This is really good um For those of you that follow the news if you're on twitter or linked in or just following a different sort of tech news from um The mainframes and cobalt, which is a software language for the mainframe um There's a lot of pressure on um, u.s. Uh systems running on the mainframe Okay, and because of that pressure and I think that there's a very uh, that's a this I'll just repeat that statistic So march the 29th of april of 14th Seven weeks that's one week the number of people filing unemployment in just new york has gone up by 2700 percent since last year and that's just a very You know anything we can do to help that anything anybody can do to address that is obviously a very noble thing to do um the uh And one of the things I think it's uh, we need Phil murphy. I think he was a Governor of new york, new jersey. I'm not quite sure what basically said we need cobalt developers You know our systems are under stress our systems under duest, you know, and there was just a call to the community and you can see the number of um job applications and interest for cobalt like a little graph in the what be the southeast corner of this Slide, so I like to say also southeast bottom right hand corner um, so you can see a number of cobalt developers massive demand for cobalt developers and um So I'm just going to click forward. Uh, there was a training course that was created by uh Using the zoe explorer to try and teach people cobalt and you can see a lot of headlines and I'm just throwing a few up here look at the animation about cobalt being given a new life and there are video courses now on Uh, using learning cobalt. This is a particular one here given by my colleague called Jeff Visti um April of 14th was when the cobalt training course was released using the zoe explorer and on the day it went out It already had 52,000 views And there's a picture of Jeff up here and they have cobalt fridays. Anyway, so one of the things I love about working on Zoe is the fact that When there's a need to do something and need to create cobalt education Very quickly it was able to pivot with the open mainframe project and create videos and they have cobalt fridays And it's all done using vs code. So people who like using vs code want to become cobalt developers Transfer their skills across there's just a great range of activity from youtube to Collaboration training courses and it's just a good new story. I wanted to share with people Okay, so let me get back on track the zerry command line interface i'm gonna do a little bit of Now this is interesting. So vs code nice rich gooey twisty click edit github push, you know get pull get like Fabulous fabulous product. How to have everybody who's worked on that another interesting thing about modern computing platforms is Command line interfaces. So I use git I have gooey's for using git But I spend a lot of my time actually doing git status and get branch and get checkout and get push and get fact and get merge and Say but I tend to write things in a command line It right. I use a mac. I use a shelf and it's quite interesting. I do the same with docker Right. Yeah, do the same with aws. I'm the web services So this is kind of lowest common denominator if you can do things in text It's good. First of all, it means you can just type them But it also means you can script them and you can automate them and you can You know, you can programmatically drive a computing interface and there is something nice about a command line interface because if you Even if beneath your command line interface, you're actually talking across rest or you're doing HTTPS or something like that You know being able to submit You know do posts and puts and get and deletes and you know past JSON objects and stuff That's a lot of boilerplate code. It's a lot easier to just crank it out in English Now one of the things that I like about the zerry command line interface So we have a thing called the zerry command line interface first of all I should have done that there's a very big successful component than zerry And you download it the same way you were downloaded, you know a docker client or a git client or something like that You basically download our zerry command line interface. It's built upon no You just type in the command zerry, but what I like about it is it's um If I go I'll just go back one more if you look at when I typed in the command zerry It tells me everything I can do so if I looked on the bottom it says config plugins profiles, you know Jobs etc and that there's something there called files Now I don't know what to do about files. I just typed zerry files and it reveals Just what I need to know When I need to know it so I typed zerry files and it says well, what do you want to do? And I can look at this and it says zerry files list and I'm like cool I want my list of file and then I just typed zerry files list. Maybe I want to pick two files zerry files And hang on this platform boom. Here we go zerry files list It's a what kind of files you'd like to look to the main frame. I said multiple types of files as a unix file system another file system called data sets and things There's a little bit older, but then they just used to store different types of data um So zerry files list and then I typed zerry files list ds And then it gives me some some examples and I dug dory files list ds And I qualify and it gives me a list back so very quickly just rattling through what's nice about the zerry command line interface is You don't have to remember all the commands, right? You're not going to make a mistake As you ask it and as you type incomplete commands, it tells you what else you need to know I used to work with someone in Uh, who was a documentation and they had a thing called progressive discovery and it's but it feels very progressive It feels a bit like I love google Chrome google is my go-to search engine because It it you know It's it's blank until I start typing things in and when I start typing things in it reveals information to me I remember back in the day with other search engines and you went in before you typed anything It told you the weather where you were and you know, it told you it was kind of like a sort of massive, you know Load of information coming flying out the screen at you and I haven't even told you what I want to know yet And you're telling me all this stuff. Maybe, you know, I haven't asked to type the weather Anyway, so what I like about the zerry command line interface is that it just tells you what you need to know when you want to know it so And a quick slide and show you here. It's just this is standard unix shell script and it's very useful for automation so again If I know how to write shell script There are samples by the way using the zerry command line interface using other scripting languages as well You know like Then I can very easily type in a sort of fairly similar Type syntax and I can operate the mainframe and I haven't got near a green screen. I haven't had to learn You know all this great green screen technology. I'm just writing a command line interface okay And a few other things I want to very quickly show the command line interface is extensible So you can build plugins for the command line interface think back to my initial thing about vhs versus beta max or coffee pods If nobody's filling your coffee pods, nobody's going to buy coffee makers, right? Got me. I haven't got the movies. So there is a program a conformance program a bit like sort of ready for zerry you think about You know getting stuff into an app store so you can build plugins for zerry Another zerry thing that's quite neat. I want to talk about is That there's this is a web desktop and the web desktop sounds a bit like an oxymoron But basically if you have zerry installed on your mainframe computer You can just log on from a browser. You don't need any other client software installed You don't need you just need your browser works in chrome or firefox isn't me running in chrome in incognito mode um, and you can see it's got little series of um Apps at the bottom. There's about four little tiles. You can see I've got a 32 70 emulator if I want to I can do that Zerry's got modern interface, but it's not leaving behind other people And I've also got a nice modern interface like so you can do file editing old and the next slide I'm going to show you it's extensible these are just richer A bit like when you first get a phone a phone would have a few apps on it perhaps a calculator Perhaps a web browser and a conference But you can go to your phone app store and just get more stuff and download it And again with a conformance program backing you can go to zerry and you can get more apps on zerry Okay, I needed the samples of apps that you can get onto zerry Okay So i'm just going to quickly wrap up so zerry is open source code at zerry.org It's all of our source code is on github.com slash zerry This is a picture of our artifact repository, which is where we hold builds and our jenkins pipeline No passwords are needed to access that obviously you need to elevated permissions if you want to start doing things like manipulating the pipeline or or you know or You know approving pull requests or so forth or you know uploading to artifact tree But you can read access to anything that we have out there There's no Secret source as well. We this is our calendar. So you can join any meeting for any squad This is our slack. We have a slack workspace, which is where people can interact with the community and I'm just going to wrap up there. I think If people have questions by the way, um Then please go and I think there's a q and a thing at the bottom And uh, you can ask a question. I'm just going to go there now to see if anybody has asked a question So either i'm operating it wrong or else nobody's asked a question, but uh If anybody wants to ask a question by the way after this if you don't have if there's something that I left off uh Please just go to zoe.org and on zoe.org you'll see all of the links to where you can get to slack channels and mailing lists and um We all hang out on those so if you need any help youtube is great if you go to youtube there's phenomenal videos um, if you go to zoe, there's a click to the documentation the documentation is very very useful as well um And uh, if you can't find what you're looking for, um, just please go ahead. Okay So I have a question as an old system programmer how to get involved So we love system programmers, and I'm sorry if I appeared at all sort of agist. I'm kind of old myself You know, I haven't got much hair on top of my head. Um, so Basically good at zoe.org and I really really enjoy working with Uh experience main framers when we first released zoe We had a lot of issues where we weren't using saff key rings correctly And there were certain issues to do with zos security that we didn't understand We didn't have a chapter on Workflow management WLM and all of those were actually contributed by experienced people um So great question, but basically go to zoe.org and I think we even have a link on there called getting involved or getting started I've got another question. I'm new to this, but I'm a network engineer. I love mainframes how to get started Again the same thing go to zoe.org this slack workspace Probably all of us if I mean I tend to drown in emails. I when email first came I was I used to live in emails now. I live in slack I'll be honest. I live in slack. I find it much easier So not everybody has slack and apologies for that, but there is a client for your phone If your laptop is about enterprise laptop and they and they don't allow you to deploy it You can also run it in a browser as well Um, but slack is is the place to go to and if you can't get to slack Open mainframe project is on is on LinkedIn. It's on Twitter So you can reach out to people there and there's some great discussions going on there um The other thing I just wanted just very quickly my last point one of the problems with the mainframe is sometimes It's chicken and egg. It's that if you want to get involved with the mainframe You have to be hired by a company that's got a mainframe before you can log on to the mainframe Because you know that that's sort of big big computers like we said I mean big, you know credit card. I know probably the world's largest credit company I think it's only got like two mainframes Um, but then it's chicken and egg thing because then how do you become a mainframe? So if you go to zoe.org You'll find out you can get access to a mainframe. So there's that cobalt training course I talked about beforehand if you join that Which is on the link for zoe.org or cobalt training course You will get your own access to a mainframe virtual machine Which is your own private sandbox and there's also a link on zoe.org that says I want I want to have access and you'll get It's called z trial. So it's running in the public cloud You're given your own credentials The first thing you're going to do when you log on is change it or insist you change your password It's not shared with anybody else all information you upload onto there Even the people running the systems can't see what you're doing with it So you can basically you knock yourself out at your own sandbox But obviously you have to keep renewing it because it does require some computing resources You can and after a while if you're not using it They're going to recycle it so you can get your own mainframe to basically kick around the block Awesome. I'm one minute over time. So I'm just going to wrap up and let you all have the rest of your rest of your monday back Cool. Thanks everybody. Stay safe. All right. Take care