My Notes from Developer Relations Conference

March 26-27 I attended a Developer Relations conference hosted by Evans Data in Palo Alto, CA. I was a good conference, with great content and speakers. The conference probably had about 100-150 people which I really liked.

These are my notes from sessions and keynotes I attended. Again, these are my notes and what I was able to write down and not necessary what the presenter said/showed.

Anatomy of an Amazon Alexa Evangelist
Paul Cutsinger, Amazon – Head of Alexa Voice Design Education

  • You have to love to teach
  • You have to love to travel
  • Workshops == training
  • Send internal newsletter to show what you have been doing
  • User feedback loop
    • Important to be in meeting with product and tell them what works and what doesn’t work

Virtual Event ROI: Experiments and Learnings
Cliff Simpkins, Microsoft – Director, Azure Developer Marketing

  • Developer events
    • What has worked well
      • Focus more on in-person value, less on deep content
      • Do lecture for an hour
        • Do 15 minutes lab
    • Setup your labs so that developers get the “ah-ha” moment
    • Community events
  • Bringing engineers/experts to places that don’t usually see them
  •  Anti-hackathon
    • Tell about the hack upfront and help with the last “mile” of the project

Continue reading “My Notes from Developer Relations Conference” →

Kubernetes Hands-on Training

We are running hands-on Containers and Kubernetes training in San Francisco on Tuesday, March 27, 2018. If you are new to Containers, this is a really good workshop you wouldn’t want to miss. Your instructor is Erin McKean who is awesome, she is the founder of Wordnik and loves APIs!

After attending the workshop developers will learn:

  • Understand the value that containers can bring to your applications
  • Differentiate between containers and VMs
  • Container orchestration (Kubernetes/K8s)
  • The value that containers can bring to your applications
  • How to differentiate between containers and VMs
  • The basics of containers
  • The current landscape of container orchestration and get hands-on practice with orchestrating your own containers with a simple Kubernetes exercise

Register for this workshop.

Great Index Conference Sessions I Attended with Videos

At the end of February IBM hosted its first open developer community conference called Index in San Francisco.  At the conference I was helping as a “room captain”. My duties included greeting the speaker, and ensuring the video/audio equipment was running smoothly as all the talks were recorded. Pretty simple 😉.

The conference had a number of very interesting sessions that I wanted to attend and most of them were in the same track – The Rise of the Human Side of Technology.  This worked very nice as I volunteered to be the room captain for sessions that I actually wanted to attend.

Below you will find the session I attended and links to videos. I highly recommend you watch the videos as all the talks were great.

Bear Douglas Lead Developer Advocate at Slack, in her talk Getting out of the bubble with global developer communities, covered strategies for planning and executing your first global developer tour – particularly in regions where you are less connected or unfamiliar with your developers. Watch the session video.

Alaina Kafkes Software Engineer at Medium, in her talk Tackling Technical Writing, covered empathetic, accessible, and thorough technical tutorials & blog posts break down tech’s barrier to entry and foster inclusion. Alaina shared actionable pointers to get people started with technical writing. Watch the session video.

Stephanie Morillo Content Manager at DigitalOcean, in her talk Creating a Sustainable Documentation Framework for Open Source Projects, discussed how content strategy inspired me to think beyond writing & editing Bundler’s docs, to thinking of docs as a product in itself. Watch the session video.

Sandra Person Global PM at Mozzila, in her talk Reflections on the Mozilla Developer Roadshow Journey talked about spending 10 months on the road collaborating with global partners and local meetups, influential speakers and freshly minted contributors, to bring over 57 Developer Roadshow programs all around the world. Watch the session video.

The following session is from Programming languages and platforms track.

Amahdy Abdelaziz, Developer Advocate at Vaadin, in his talk on Dismantling a Progressive Web App, demonstrated how you can actually build modern web applications that qualify as “Progressive Web Apps”. Watch the session video.

Of course there were many other great session and you can watch them all on the IBM Code YouTube channel.

Introduction to Kubernetes Lunch & Learn – Video Recording

The San Francisco Developer Advocacy team hosted another great Lunch & Learn event. The topic was Kubernetes. The session covered what is Kubernetes, how it works and what are its benefits? The session was lead by Andy Shi and Anthony Amase.  Here is what the session covered and then jump to the session video recording.

  • Problems that need to be solved in the micro-services world and how does K8s solve them?
  • Benefits K8s brings to DevOps
  • Concepts and terminologies in K8s
  • A demo showcasing the features and benefits of K8s on the IBM Cloud platform

Are you in the Bay Area and want to learn about AI, Blockchain, Serverless, Kubernetes, Istio, Chatbots and other technologies – come to our upcoming free developer workshops.

What Is Machine Learning for the Enterprise – Video Recording

The San Francisco team hosted What is Machine Learning for the Enterprise Lunch-and-Learn event. This event was an absolute beginner’s guide to machine learning for the enterprise. Kanishk Priyadarshi, Head of Engineering and Innovation at IBM, covered strategic and design-thinking inspired conversation for beginners to explore and apply machine learning at your enterprise! In case you missed it, you can watch the video below. If you want to learn about Watson AI, Containers, Blockchain, Serverless, APIs and other topics, please check out our upcoming developer workshops.

 

How to Invoke the Watson Language Translator API from an Appery.io App

In this blog post you will learn how to invoke the Watson Language Translator API from an Appery.io app. Before you will learn how to do that, let me give you a quick overview of the Appery.io platform.

Appery.io is a cloud platform for building and running mobile web and hybrid apps. The platform provides the following major benefits:

  • A visual, drag and drop UI builder (based on jQuery Mobile, Ionic or Bootstrap)
  • A cloud database for storing app data.
  • Node.js-like environment (called Server Code) for running any custom app code (written in JavaScript).
  • API Express for connecting to any external/enterprise data sources such as a SQL database, web service or a REST API.
  • Sending Push Notifications.

If you are looking for more Appery.io content, simply look for posts tagged with Appery.io.

Appery.io makes it very easy to invoke any 3rd party REST APIs using Server Code or API Express. In this blog post you will learn how to invoke the Watson Language Translator API from Server Code. Let’s start.

Watson Language Translator API

In this section you will learn how to start with the IBM Cloud and launch the Watson Language Translator API. The Language Translator API allows to translate one language to another language. Other API features include detecting the what language was entered. To learn more about the API here.

Continue reading “How to Invoke the Watson Language Translator API from an Appery.io App” →

Supercharge Your APIs with OpenAPI: Lunch and Learn – Video Recording

Last week the IBM Developer Advocates team hosted another Lunch-and-Learn event. Erin McKean covered the OpenAPI spec (formerly known as Swagger), what it is, and how using the spec makes it easier to plan, create, test, and share your APIs?
If you missed the event, you can watch the live-streamed version below.  The session covered:
  • What is the OpenAPI spec?
  • How can you create an OpenAPI description for your new or existing API?
  • What can you do with your OpenAPI description—including automated testing, code generation, creating interactive documentation, and more!
  • How you can get involved with the spec and how to share the benefits of OpenAPI with your team

Part 1:

Part 2:

Looking for more events like this – check out our upcoming events in San Francisco and the South Bay.

Containers (Microservices) 101: Lunch and Learn – Video Recording

In September we hosted another successful Lunch and Learn event. This time we covered Containers 101 (Microservices) and of course we served a delicious lunch.  If you are in San Francisco, definitely consider coming to our next free event.

Here is what Andy Shi and Anthony Amanse, our in-house Containers experts covered:

  • What is a Container (Microservice), how it works and what are its benefits?
  • Explain the 12-factors app, a modern methodology for building software-as-a-service apps, and how to get there
  • What transitions are needed to get from monolithic architecture to micro-services app using Containers (Microservices)
  • The Docker build command, demonstrating the Docker repo and images
  • How to use Cloud Foundry (Bluemix) “cf” command to push and run a container

If you missed the event or simply would like to watch the recoding, check it out below.

Blockchain 101: Lunch and Learn – Video Recording

At the end of August we hosted a Blockchain 101 – Lunch and Learn event in Galvanize in San Francisco. It’s a very informal, easy going, educational lecture on an interesting topic. Our first one was on Blockchain. And of course we provide a delicious lunch.

Everyone is talking about Blockchain. You hear about Blockchain on the news and everywhere else. We think not many people understand what Blockchain is, how it works and what are the benefits. This exactly why we host these educational sessions. Plus, you need to eat lunch anyways.

We streamed the Blockchain 101 Lunch and Learn and below you will find links to the recordings (the same session broken into two “streams”).

Want to learn or attend our upcoming events, check them out here.

Learn How to Build a Chatbot – Hands-on Developer Workshop

We are hosting another technical workshop, this time on how to build your first chatbot.  If this sounds interesting please register as space is limited.

Description

In this technical hands-on workshop you will learn how to build your first chatbot and then integrate it with Slack. In this session you will learn and build:

  • How to train your chatbot to reply to questions using intents, entities, dialog
  • How to customize your chatbot to reply to more questions
  • How to integrate your chatbot with Slack using OpenWhisk

The chatbot will be built using Watson Conversation.

This is not your typical meetup, this is a technical hands-on workshop where you will learn how to build your first chatbot. This workshop is free but please register to reserve your space now.

Schedule

6:00-6:30pm: Light dinner and registration
6-30-8:30pm: Build your first chatbot workshop

Register

Yes, I want to build my first chatbot