Blogs

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 ...

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). ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

This summer, I worked as a User Experience (UX) Research intern with the Mainframe Software Division of Broadcom. As the first-ever Research intern on the Mainframe UX team, it was an exciting opportunity to learn from and contribute to the talented UX team behind the software for some of the most impactful systems in the world. During my internship, I focused on a project titled "Smartly Integrate AI with UX Research," which aimed to explore how artificial intelligence can enhance the UX process within Broadcom. Additionally, I worked closely with a Principal UX researcher on the Precision Design System, conducting a large-scale UX research project on ...

My name is Saashin, and I’m a rising senior at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. This past summer, I was fortunate enough to be selected for Broadcom’s Next-Gen Mainframer Program in Lisle, where I focused on a project in mainframe security. Prior to this opportunity, I had no experience or even familiarity with mainframes, their software stack, or current purpose in today’s world of computing. However, being introduced to this area of software development has led me to thoroughly enjoy it. More specifically, my project’s focus this summer has been on creating a testing facility for one of Broadcom’s mainframe security products, which ...