What happens if you offer college students an opportunity to build experience on a server platform that can scale to 12 billion encrypted transactions per day on a single hardware footprint? How about one that can support up to 2 million Docker containers and 1,000 concurrent NoSQL databases?

SHARE began as the first-ever enterprise IT user group back in 1955, and for many years operated its conference events under “SHARE Inc.”, a not-for-profit Delaware-based corporation that is subject to both state and federal corporate income taxes.

The hackathon has become an important educational resource for budding developers looking to cut their teeth in programming. In fact, more than 200,000 people took part in hackathons across more than 100 countries in 2016, according to an analysis of Hackathon.com data from BeMyApp.

Education is a major barrier to filling the mainframe skills gap. COBOL, CICS, IMS – the acronyms alone are enough to confuse or intimidate any young IT professional scanning ads for mainframe jobs.