Stream: Suzuka
Time: 11:15 - 12:00
As a pre-final year CS student with no prior mainframe exposure, I set out to build the learning tool I wished existed. This session walks through building an interactive mainframe education platform for the Open Mainframe Project — featuring a live in-browser COBOL sandbox, an LLM-generated 130-question assessment engine, automated PDF certification, and a scroll-driven JCL-console-styled UI. I'll cover the architecture decisions (Node.js/Express, Docker, Render), the tradeoffs of using AI to generate technical assessments at scale, and the practical lessons of designing for an audience — early-career learners — that I was, until recently, part of myself. Attendees will leave with concrete patterns for building engaging, low-friction onboarding tools for niche technical domains, and an honest account of what worked, what didn't, and what I'd do differently.
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Tushar is a pre-final year Computer Science student (FinTech Honors) at SRM Institute of Science and Technology, India, and an IBM Z Student Ambassador and Google Gemini Campus Ambassador. As an LFX Mentee with the Open Mainframe Project's Mainframe Open Education initiative, he built an interactive learning platform featuring a live COBOL sandbox, AI-generated assessments, and automated certification — designed to lower the barrier to entry for students discovering mainframe technology for the first time. He writes regularly about mainframe and enterprise technology on Medium, and is passionate about making enterprise computing approachable for the next generation of engineers.