IBM Developer Day - Whataday!

When one of the biggest open-source company announces Developer Day with events covering open-source, Cloud, AI & Blockchain, I wanted to experience the event and familiarize the technologies defining the present software development.

What really astonished me was the number of Devs & enthusiasts who attended the event! It was jam packed. There were hands-on sessions, booths & talks covering Blockchain, Data & AI, Cloud.

The panel discussion by IBM's CEO Ginni Rometty concentrated on open-source & how open-source is revolutionizing the way companies look at software. IBM has acquired Red Hat, which is one of the biggest companies with open-source business model.

Julian Gordon, VP, The Linux Foundation, urged developers to just dive into contributing to open-source, starting with improving documentation and concentrating on low hanging fruits in the initial stages. He said pretty much every modern computer runs an open source software & more than 10,000 lines of code is contributed to the Linux Foundation everyday!
Dr. Lata Iyer, Global Head, Digital Engg Services, Royal Bank of Scotland talked about how banks such as RBS have warmed up to open-source in the fields of digital analytics, blockchain to digitally support customers. One of the big methodologies RBS has ensured is that they use curated software approved by the regulators (for both proprietary & open-source).
Gautam Khanna of Infosys said the biggest myth is that Open source is free. There are costs associated with talent, scarcity, taking sub-optimal decisions regards to software. He said open-source has led to the democratization of software and hopes there will be democratization of data for bringing transparency in AI. Moments in time database by IBM is a good example of it.

IBM announced “India Developer champions”, a multi year program to recognize software developers contributions in open-source, in collaboration with Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) & Nasscom. 

Cloud Track:
Cloud is 14 years old, and 80% of the businesses have yet to move to cloud. This explains the enormous opportunity & challenges that exists in the Cloud.
The first tech talk on cloud by Girish Dhanakshirur concentrated on the difference between monolithic & microservices architecture and how to start thinking in terms of microservices. IBM worked with the American Airlines to move their website & apps to microservices architecture which cut down the maintenance time by 80%! IBM cloud architecture consists of open source softwares Kubernetes, Containerd, Istio, Docker.
Tech talks on Cloud touched upon the caveats of microservices, Kubernetes, and finally about IBM cloud.

There were hands-on sessions & deep dive workshops which I could not attend (There simply was too much to do in a day). But those who attended did say sessions were eventful.

AI Track:
AI Sessions concentrated on Machine Learning, Data Science, Deep Learning, Speech & Language Processing etc., The session about how startups are using AI in fighting fake news was insightful.

There were many demo booths by IBM developers showcasing the latest technologies that they were working on. There was a Virtual Reality game that included user setting up servers!

One very interesting news was that BSE was the first stock exchange in the world to run on open-source! And now both BSE & NSE run on Red Hat along with UIDAI (Aadhar).

That was about #IBMDevDay. I'm off to start contributing to open-source software by fixing documentation. Hope to see you contribute to open-source too!