How our project about a 60 year-old programming language became a hot topic

I didn’t expect the topic of my newest project to be on the nightly news. Nor for our resulting deliverable to be viewed over 100,000 times in the first two weeks of release. Yet that’s exactly what happened. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. 

The story begins at the SHARE conference in February, a mainframe users conference held in Fort Worth, Texas. We were scrambling to get a project off the ground to build a book and video course to teach COBOL to beginners. The project was in partnership with the State of California - who needed new COBOL programmers to work on their systems, and American River College, who would be teaching them. By the following week we’d assembled a team and gathered in Sacramento California to start work.

A week later, we found ourselves unexpectedly back on the plane flying home. Business travel had been suspended and we were going to have to finish this remotely. The week we did have together was hugely valuable, as we translated real world COBOL experience into an education roadmap to train COBOL newbies.

From here on in, everything became about remote collaboration. We worked together daily using Box, Slack, and WebEx - all tools that worked for our ensemble of corporate, government, and academic participants.

Meanwhile, COBOL was making the news in a big way. Governor Murphy of New Jersey made a call for volunteers to work on their unemployments benefits system. The COBOL skills shortage was being talked about everywhere. 

We’d initially planned to publish a book and labs with the Open Mainframe Project. That turned into a full open source project - approved in record time - whereby the book itself became an asset that the open source community could amend and add to. We published our book and labs to the Open Mainframe Project four weeks after meeting in Sacramento. Two weeks later our Github repository had received over 116,00 views.

Following publication we’ve hosted webinars, and recorded an accompanying video series. The community has embraced our COBOL book, even to the extent of independently authoring new chapters to it. We’ve built a living, ever improving asset. Not bad for a topic that a couple of months ago few people even remembered still existed.