Not your typical clubbing experience
Last week, members of the JazzHub team spent a lot of time together at the Hakkasan nightclub in Las Vegas. While there are rumors that the team got together for some late night debauchery, I won’t get into that here…
The real reason why the team visited Las Vegas was for the dev@Pulse conference, which was held at the Hakkasan nightclub February 24 – 25. We were thrilled to be able to show off all of our fabulous new features to developers in person! The conference brought together developers for two days of learning, hands-on activities, and lots of food (complete with free flowing Red Bull).
Adam Archer, Ken Walker, and I were mentors for the Node.js Apps with JazzHub & IBM BlueMix lab. The lab walked users through deploying a Node.js app from the JazzHub Web IDE to the cloud in Codename: BlueMix, viewing the app running live in the cloud, making a change to the code, redeploying the app to the cloud, and then configuring the project to automatically deploy to the cloud whenever code changes were committed.
While it sounds like a lot of things to do in one lab, we were excited to see how easy it was for participants to complete the steps. Participants ranged in age from a 14 year old hacker to more “mature” product managers who don’t work with code regularly. While we advertised that the lab would take fifteen minutes to complete, participants were actually able to complete it in about five. Participants commonly asked us follow up questions on how to do other things in JazzHub because they found the lab so simple. If you’d like to try out the lab yourself, it’s not too late! You can follow the lab instructions posted here.
Adam giving one-on-one advice during Office Hours
Another great part of dev@Pulse was the Office Hours. Participants had the opportunity to schedule one on one meetings with IBM Distinguished Engineers and Subject Matter Experts (check out the list of who was available–it’s pretty impressive) to discuss career advice, creative problem solving, or deep technical issues. We enjoyed getting one on one time with attendees.
dev@Pulse also featured a series of lightning talks organized in various chapters like Game Design and UIs, Designing through Cloud-Based Platforms, and Rapid App Development and Open Source Software. Scott Rich gave a talk in the Development in the Open World chapter on developing in the cloud, for the cloud with DevOps services. He explained how you can use JazzHub to code for the cloud completely in your browser. You can check out Scott’s slides here.
I wonder if being a star at a nightclub is on Scott's bucket list?
Communicate with drones via tweets? Count me in!
My favorite part of dev@Pulse (besides all of the food) was the playground. The playground had live interactive demos that participants could try themselves. The Oculus Rift demo was very popular, and I heard the games were creepily realistic. I watched the Raspberry Pi demo where someone set his phone on the Raspberry Pi, and a new tweet was automatically composed. My favorite demo was the Drone Zone. There I was able to tell a drone to take off by tweeting to it (watch the video!) and watch the live drone cam as the drone moved about the room. (The live drone cam was straight out of a recent Modern Family episode, and I really wanted to use it to spy on people attending IBM Pulse sessions, but for some reason the drone owners didn’t want to let it out of the nighclub–go figure.)
If you’d like to hear more about the latest features in JazzHub and what happened at dev@Pulse, watch the video Ken and I recorded during the event.
To see all of the fun we had at dev@Pulse, view our Facebook album.
We had a great time at dev@Pulse, and we hope to see you there next year!
Lauren Schaefer
Web Developer, JazzHub
Social Media Lead, Jazz.net and JazzHub
The great thing about conferences is they bring together our very distributed team! From left to right: Hari Vetsa (JazzHub Ops, Boston, United States), Sreenivasan "Raj" Rajagopal (JazzHub Product Manager, Boston, United States), Scott Rich (JazzHub Chief Architect, Zürich, Switzerland), Adam Archer (JazzHub Tech Lead, Toronto, Canada), Ken Walker (Tech Lead for JazzHub Web IDE and Eclipse Orion, Ottawa, Canada), Lauren Schaefer (JazzHub Social Media Lead & Web Developer, Maryland, United States)
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