Ask HN: ZOS/Cobol Development in Canada?

[SuperPaintMan]

Hey HN,

I've been playing around with zOS in Hercules and the MTM Learning System for the past few weeks learning how the internal plumbing of the system works and how to create Cobol programs and using tools like DB2, CICS, JCL & whatnot and quite frankly I am absolutely in love with the system (as weird as that is to say about a development environment limited to the width of a punch card). I'm curious if anyone can weigh in on how the current landscape looks in Canada here and maybe give me some advice moving forward.

I currently do not have my CS degree, I attempted a few years back but failed out due to non-school related issues. Despite this, I have been working with Go/React/RN/GAE with a few projects and small utilities for my own use, primarily stuff to scratch my own itch. I'm much more comfortable and capable on the backend using concurrent and distributed code but can hack together a janky frontend. Most of these projects are unpublishable. That and I live in the middle of Saskatoon Saskatchewan, not too many CS jobs out here and most of my CS boys that have graduated and stayed are employed in other functions. So relocation is pretty much required but I'm not looking to leave the country.

I'm coming up short on ideas to build that would both expand my Cobol knowledge, familiarity/exposure to IBM system facilities and looks well in a Github repo. Could anyone point me in a decent direction for contemporary best practices/codebases or just give me some project ideas to go bash my brain against? Short of that any sort of advice here would be wonderful.

Thanks boys, I appreciate it.