Ask HN: Where to find opportunities to practice z/OS CICS development?

2 points by myth2018 4y ago ↗ HN

Hi all. I've been assessing the feasibility of getting into COBOL/CICS development, since this market seems to be really active on my country and I'm also a bit sick of current trends on software development.

However, I'm having some trouble on finding an opportunity of getting access to a mainframe for practice.

Could anyone give me some ideas/directions? I totally consider paying for such access, naturally.

PS: suggestions/advice are welcome as well, as I'm still just thinking about taking this path. Besides, I think I'm well aware of what I'll eventually encounter in terms of code quality and maintainability -- I've been working with 'older' languages and legacy projects for some time now and I feel less unhappy this away.

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lboc 4y ago ↗

Try this for a bunch of free z courses (with real machine access for labs)

https://www.ibm.com/training/

I've done 4 or 5 including z/OS and COBOL.

There's also:

https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education/zxplore

Which appears to be the replacement for the Master the Mainframe program. Includes real machine access.

Although it's usefulness in comparison to real z/OS access is debatable, you might also check out the TK4- system which is an old MVS packaged along with the Hercules emulator. A lot of stuff hasn't changed in z/OS, but a lot has.

http://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/