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My Summer on Broadcom's Watchtower: Monitoring a Monitor I had the amazing opportunity this summer to join the Broadcom Mainframe AIOps value stream to work on Watchtower™—an observability platform that helps users monitor the health and behavior of mainframe environments through real-time insights. My summer project focused on Watchtower’s self-observability and building a health-checking tool to monitor and assess Watchtower’s internal state. The goal - prototype and begin productizing a full-stack application that surfaces meaningful metrics, performance bottlenecks, and Kubernetes-level events. The result empowers internal developers with faster ...
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Hi, I'm Jonathan Castro — a computer science graduate from Northern Illinois University. This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to join Broadcom as a Next-Gen Mainframer on the AAM Team in the Lisle office. It has been an amazing learning experience—one that gave me hands-on exposure to real-world cybersecurity challenges. This project not only helped me sharpen my technical skills, but also allowed me to collaborate with incredible people and deepen my understanding of industry best practices in an agile environment. My Project: Automating R_FACTOR Testing Ever heard of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)? It’s essential for modern security—requiring ...
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This summer, I had the opportunity to join the Gen Product team within Broadcom’s Mainframe Division as a summer Next-Gen Mainframer. Gen is a tool that provides a unified environment for developing and maintaining large-scale applications across multiple platforms. During my time here, I worked on modernizing Gen’s application deployment process by building a command-line utility called gendeploycli . This tool automates the deployment of Gen applications in containerized environments — equipping Gen to make another step forward in the modern DevOps adoption journey. Through this project, I gained experience with the Go programming language, collaborated ...
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This summer, I had the opportunity to join Broadcom’s MRI ( Mainframe Resource Intelligence ) team as a summer Next-Gen Mainframer. Much like a medical MRI helps diagnose health issues, Broadcom’s MRI tool gives businesses and IT leaders deep insights into their mainframe systems—insights that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. Customers who use MRI can gain access to a variety of assessments and reports, including hardware analysis, security audits, and execution metrics. And, perhaps most impressively, as a Beyond Code offering, MRI is available at no cost to Broadcom customers. Understanding how these entitlements are used is critical; usage ...
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This summer, I had the opportunity to work on the Support Team at Broadcom. In my first week, I met the entire team and quickly began shadowing Support Engineers to learn what their daily responsibilities looked like. They introduced me to a web-based tool called Wolken, which they use to manage support cases, customer information, and case statuses. While observing how they completed and closed cases, I noticed some inefficiencies in their workflow. Although they used Wolken to communicate with customers, they often had to leave the platform to search for the information they needed to resolve the case. To help streamline their workflow and ...
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Working at Broadcom this summer was an incredible experience, one that significantly shaped my career growth and introduced me to a culture where collaboration is deeply embedded in the software we build. The professionalism and work ethic of the people here left a lasting impression on me. Everyone I encountered was welcoming, especially toward newer team members like myself, offering guidance on how to navigate the environment and make the most of the opportunity. My team was nothing short of exceptional. Watching them manage multiple projects with such grace and effectiveness was inspiring. Every day brought measurable progress, and I found myself constantly ...
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Last summer, I worked on the Zowe Python SDK project with the Zowe team under the Open Mainframe Project at Broadcom’s Pittsburgh office. This summer, I rejoined the team to contribute further on a different project. Arriving in May, I felt a mix of excitement and anticipation—eager to build on my prior experience and dive once again into the world of mainframe development. Just like last time, the team’s warm welcome and collaborative spirit set the tone for an engaging and intensive 12 week journey. What I Focused On My work this summer centered on Zowe Native Proto, an open-source, SSH-based protocol designed to expose z/OS operations with minimal ...
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Hi, I’m Jeff Wong—a computer engineering graduate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After an incredible summer with the z/Raiders team last year, this marks my second time working as a Next-Gen Mainframer—again under Broadcom’s MSD Data Management Team. This summer, I joined the Pioneers, a team focused on making database administration on the mainframe seamless. My role? Use modern tools to accelerate that mission by a factor of ten. Project Overview My project focused on developing and integrating automated tests for RC/Compare for Db2 for z/OS, a Broadcom tool that runs under ISPF (Interactive System Productivity Facility). ...
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My Summer Experience with Broadcom Mainframe This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to work with Broadcom’s Mainframe Division, specifically with the Precision SDK teams, including Dashboard and Core SDK. As it was my first experience with a summer-long position, I wasn’t sure what to expect—but any uncertainty quickly disappeared once I dove into my project. The Problem: Visual Defects Hurt User Trust Visual bugs are more than cosmetic—they erode customer trust. In fact, 88% of users say they’re unlikely to return after a poor experience. At present, Precision’s visual checks are done manually. This process is time-consuming, costly, ...
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This summer, I had the opportunity to be part of Broadcom’s Summer Worker Program as a User Interface Developer. From day one, I knew I was going to learn a lot—but I didn’t realize just how much I would grow, not only as a developer, but also as a teammate, communicator, and contributor. Diving In: Understanding the Problem I joined the Datacom team, where I was introduced to a powerful product designed to provide insights into query performance across large-scale database environments. While the backend team focused on core logic and infrastructure, my responsibility centered on how users—primarily DBAs—interact with this data to ensure a helpful and ...
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This summer, I had the opportunity to join the the Gen Product Team within Broadcom’s Mainframe Division as a summer Next-Gen Mainframer. Gen is a tool that provides a unified environment for developing and maintaining large-scale applications across multiple platforms. During my time here, I worked on modernizing Gen’s application deployment process by building a command-line utility called gendeploycli . This tool automates the deployment of Gen applications in containerized environments—equipping Gen to make another step forward in the modern DevOps adoption journey. Through this project, I gained experience with the Go programming language, collaborated ...
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This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to join the Datacom team at Broadcom and work on a unique challenge: transitioning an existing assembly program to Metal C. While I had prior experience with C, C++, and some exposure to assembly in university, this was my first time diving into mainframe programming. The experience pushed me out of my comfort zone—and ended up being one of the most rewarding projects of my career so far. Background: What Is Metal C? IBM Metal C is a variant of the C programming language designed for low-level, system-level development on mainframes. It behaves like traditional C but allows direct manipulation of hardware via ...
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My Journey with Advanced Authentication and Mainframe Security Hi, my name is MJ. As a Next-Gen Mainframer and computer science graduate from Northern Illinois University, I had the incredible opportunity this summer to contribute to cutting-edge mainframe security on the Advanced Authentication Method (AAM) QA Automation Team at Broadcom. This summer work deepened my technical knowledge and showed me how modern development practices can transform the way we test legacy systems. Mainframes are the backbone of enterprise computing, powering critical industries like finance, healthcare, transportation, and telecommunications. As cyber threats ...
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This summer, I had the exciting opportunity to work as a Software Engineer Summer Worker at Broadcom’s Plano, TX office. It was a hands-on, immersive experience that gave me invaluable exposure to real-world software development challenges. Not only did I sharpen my technical skills and broaden my understanding of industry best practices, but I also made lasting connections with a great team. The Problem: Manual, Time-Consuming Vulnerability Triage At the core of my time with Broadcom this summer was a project focused on automating the triage of security vulnerabilities flagged in third-party components used in Broadcom’s applications. ...
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The Mission: Simplifying Mainframe Security This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to work at the Lisle office as a Next-Gen Mainframer in UX Research. Building on an academic foundation in Cognitive Science focusing on Psychology/HCI and AI from UT Dallas and prior UX research experiences in distributed environments, I was eager to dive into the unique challenges and immense potential of the mainframe world. From day one, the warm welcome and collaborative spirit of the Broadcom team, including UX colleagues, set the stage for an immersive and impactful twelve-week journey. The mission this summer? To contribute to making the mainframe experience ...
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As a Next-Gen Mainframer, I’ve always realized the importance of Quality Assurance (QA) as an integral part of any development process. The phrase “Customers don’t want to be treated as QA” couldn’t be more impactful and imperative; however, developers are human, after all, and they can sometimes overlook steps within this crucial task. In any product, especially a complex one, developers cannot plan for every possible issue that may arise after its release. The obvious answer to this problem involves thorough testing, but this answer raises another question: how comprehensive should this testing be? With time spent in the testing phase as the investment, ...
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DevOps Enhancements: My Summer on Broadcom’s NetMaster Team This summer at Broadcom, I had the opportunity to join the NetMaster team—a group responsible for a powerful network monitoring tool that tracks mainframe connections. Heading into the summer-long role, I wasn’t sure what to expect, as the NetMaster team works on a wide variety of projects. I was excited to dive in, learn new skills and technologies, and contribute wherever I could. Vault as a Service: Secure Credential Management in Jenkins My first project involved integrating all of NetMaster’s Jenkins pipelines with Vault, a secure tool for storing credentials. Instead ...
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Michael Schafer: During my summer with Broadcom, I joined the NetMaster team. Like the name suggests, this team develops NetMaster, a powerful network monitoring tool for mainframe software. This tool allows mainframe users to monitor mainframe network connections and quickly address any networking issues, thereby minimizing the downtime of vital services. As I joined, the team was in the midst of developing the new NetMaster 13 release. To ensure this release is error free, timely, and aligned with customer expectations, the team is performing manual regression testing on the mainframe. This manual testing, however, is tedious, time consuming, and ...
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Next-Gen Mainframe

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My name is Keegan Miller and this was my first time being a next-gen mainframe at Broadcom and I enjoyed every second of it. The environment here at Broadcom allowed me to challenge myself and grow as a developer. I was fortunate enough to work with the 1.21 Jigawatts scrum team where I was tasked with two important projects. The first project was discovering discrepancies between the DDL generation between two company maintained products. This project was important because it allowed the team to preemptively discover issues before they were brought up by customers. In the second project, the team had me working on updating the automation framework ...
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This summer I worked in the Next-Gen Mainframer Program with the Broadcom Mainframe Software Division. This opportunity has given me great experience in developing enterprise software at the professional level. I came into this internship with limited knowledge of mainframe technologies and left learning more than I ever could in any classroom. In addition it sparked a new interest in the mainframe which is so vital to the infrastructure of the modern world. I felt as though the project assigned to me was not just busy work but something that would actually be useful and expanded upon after my time was finished. The project was on the QA side of the ...
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