(outdated) How to prepare for a Hackathon with IBM Cloud?

Today I want to address a common situation for developers: You want to participate in a hackathon, and you plan to use IBM Cloud, but you have never used it before. How to prepare?
My motivation to write this blog post is: I support some hackathons as a coach for IBM Cloud PaaS:

• Hacknext hackathon from 7-9 March 2019 in Munich (http://ibm.biz/ibm4hacknext)
• Hackbay hackathon from 4-5 April 2019 in Nuernberg
• CallForCode hackathon from 15-16 in Berlin
• Healthcare hackathon from 2-3 September 2019 in Berlin
  Sign up for IBM Cloud and get a IBM Cloud feature code at the hackerthon

IBM Cloud provides a huge amount of different services, runtimes, and so on.
BTW (by the way): From my point of view, one of the most important objectives in a hackathon is, running your created application live! To do this you need a runtime 😉

Let’s start with the basics

Let’s get a basic understanding of what the major areas in IBM Cloud are and where to find how to’s?

IBM Cloud offers a good entry point with the getting started page . That starting page was organized before into these different topics:

• Develop and deploy
  Build your apps, deploy, and scale them with IBM Cloud.
• Cognitive with Watson
  Build cloud-based exploration applications powered by Watson.
• IoT platform
  Manage your devices, visualize data and perform analytics on real-time data.
• Data science and data management
  Uncover insights hidden in the data and influence your business.
• Training
• Support

I like that overview above, because it gives you an awesome brief overview of major capabilities you get with IBM Cloud. Now the page organized in these major chapters:

• Master the basics: 10-minute tutorials

• Advance your skills

• Cloud essentials

• Dig into developer tools

• Learn how IBM Cloud works

Free online trainings

I want to highlight the CoginitiveClass.ai.
Here you get free online education on pure technical or IBM Cloud related topics.

An awesome start into IBM Cloud is the training IBM Cloud Essentials, it take approximately 3 hours.

A short impression of CoginitiveClass.ai.

What is relevant for developers?

If you are a developer, the IBM Developer with IBM Coder Program is great option for:

• Growing your skillset and reputation
• Discovering and transparently discussing content 
• Being rewarded with various tangible and intangible rewards
• Digging  into code pattern
  This gif shows a short look into IBM Developer webpage.
  Here I have tested two code patterns for myself, see how to use the code patterns:
  1) Let‘s Code Pattern 01: Use blockchain to track fitness club rewards
  2) Let‘s Code Pattern 02: Diversity and Inclusion – ensure loan fairness

Quick and easy start at the hackathon

• Runtimes

The most relevant topic to run your app as fast as possible in IBM Cloud are the runtimes.  You can choose runtimes from three major open source based technologies:  Cloud Foundry, Serverless or Kubernetes.

I like Cloud Foundry the most for a quick start at a hackathon. You instantiate one of the common build packs like Node.JS or Python in minutes and have an app with https and a free unique url available on the internet.

Create a Python Cloud Foundry App on IBM Cloud in 5 minutes.

• Services

As you notice, there is a huge amount of services available on IBM Cloud. From my perspective the easiest way to start and to integrate state-of-the-art AI services is to use the Watson Assistant service. This is the underlying service for each potential AI user interaction in your application. You can find a quick setup in the Watson Assistant Basic Starter Kit.

Access the sample Watson Assistant Basic Starter Kit application.

How to setup Watson Assistant Basic Starter Kit on IBM Cloud? 6 min youtube video.

• Prototyping

I love to use the open source developer tool Node-RED , for prototyping. From my perspective this is the best, most flexible choice to build easy integrations for almost  all web technologies in a hackathon (Web Socket, REST, HTML and so on). To get familiar with Node-RED, just follow the Getting Started page.

Inspect the response of an Watson Assistant instance in Node-RED.

IBM Cloud provides a great and easy way to instantiate Node-RED in minutes with Cloud Foundry Node.JS build pack and Cloudant.

Make the most out of Node-RED for your powerful prototyping on IBM Cloud. I made a short and more detailed youtube video: How to setup the Node-RED Starter package in IBM Cloud?

• Feature  Code?

Usually you will get a feature code from IBM for hackathons. The feature code upgrades the free IBM Lite Account to a trial account where you can use Kubernetes for free. I made a blog post about this. Here is an overview of the different IBM Cloud Account types.

So, if you are a Hacker you can just register yourself at IBM Cloud and start today 😉

I hope this was useful for you and let’s see what’s next?

Greetings,

Thomas

PS:  By the way, you can use the IBM Cloud for free, if you simply create an IBM Lite account. Here you only need an e-mail address and for more information about IBM Cloud information sources? Take a look into my blog post Usage of information sources for implementations in IBM Cloud.

 

#IBMDeveloper #CloudFoundry #IBMCloud #Hackathon #IBM4hacknext #NodeRED #WatsonAssistant #PromoCode #IBMCoderProgram