My Summer Experience at Broadcom
Vikram Iyengar
Introduction
Throughout this summer, I began my journey as a next generation mainframer at Broadcom. In late May, I entered the office and was introduced to the team and the environment at Durham, before diving into the main project I would be working on. Over the past 11 weeks, I have gained a wealth of new technical and personal skills. I want to take this chance to explain what I have been working on this summer, and also share the experiences that have made my time here so memorable and valuable.
The Task and Solution
I worked with my fellow next gen mainframer, Win Geigerman, on a project that involved improving a component on Broadcom’s Watchtower platform. Watchtower is an observability platform for mainframe users, giving them a more user-friendly interface to address different mainframe features. Our task was to implement smart features within a component in Watchtower to further enhance the user experience when executing specific mainframe commands.
We made use of a variety of tools and applications in order to implement our developments. Initially, we had to create the foundation for our project, which meant getting familiar with SpringBoot to setup and create the Java backend and our RESTful API. The biggest portion I worked on involved the UI, allowing me to make use of Broadcom’s Precision UI library. Through a combination of React, Typescript, SCSS and Precision components, I was able to implement and polish a lot of new visual features on our application. We also made use of JSoup and ANTLR as well. In order to accurately provide specific commands to the users, we scraped z/OS documentation and then ran that through a grammar we created, tokenizing our inputs. These tokens were parsed and finally stored in a PostgreSQL database, where information about the commands would be used with our API to display relevant information to the user. Our entire application was built, tested, and deployed through a DevOps pipeline using Jenkins.
Ultimately we were able to develop a lot of new features that enhanced the overall experience on this component in WatchTower, achieving our goal of improving user accessibility for less experienced mainframe users.
My Personal Experience
This project taught me a lot of new technical skills, and gave me a better insight on the mainframe itself. One particular insight came from a meeting I had with a Product Owner who had many years of experience with it. He told me just how integral and crucial the mainframe is in everyday society, with it being the technological hub behind different banks, airlines, and other large scale operations. What really stuck with me was when he said that if the mainframe goes down, the world goes down. A lot of everyday technological activities that I do would be rendered completely useless if the mainframe went down. Being able to work on an application that directly interfaced with something of this caliber was an experience I will never forget.
Beyond the technical knowledge I have gained there were a lot of moments at Broadcom which have contributed to my overall growth as a person. One thing that really stands out for me, was when I realized the importance of not only communicating my accomplishments, but my struggles as well.
As I began working on this project, I quickly encountered an obstacle which hindered my progress, making it very challenging to determine the next steps. My frustration with not being able to resolve this issue initially caused me to avoid addressing it. However, through meetings with my team and with other mentors in the office, I further realized just how vital communication about everything is when it comes to a team project.
I was able to share with my team that I was struggling on something, and that proved to be the best course of action. We discussed what the problem in my approach was and came up with a new way to address it. I realized that when you are working in a professional environment, communication is one of the most critical skills to have, and I found that my communication skills have grown every single day here.
I want to wrap up by just saying I was so fortunate to have such a great team around me. The environment here at Broadcom felt welcoming from day one. It always felt like I could talk to anyone in the office, whether it be a question regarding a story I am working on, or just in regards to life and career advice. Everyone wanted to help and make sure that we felt comfortable during our time here. I am very privileged to have spent my summer here, and I look forward to seeing what’s in store for the future.