Through college and the start of my professional career, the "end is near" was announced for the mainframe environment. Almost 20 years later in my career, it is still around powering the majority of Fortune 500 companies.

Does it need to be pulled into the future? Most certainly!

Distributed developers have many options to help them develop:

• AI code assistants
• automated pipelines
• a/b testing

Why should mainframer developers be excluded? There is potential to unlock in the enterprise data. The mainframe space needs to continue to open source the software or it will be left behind.