Index 2018 developer conference — my thoughts after the San Francisco event
Last week I spoke at and attended Index 2018 — the first edition of a new developer-focused conference by IBM. This huge event (with some 2700 attendees) was a harbinger of IBM’s new mission — becoming developer-friendly again. In its early times, IBM used to work closely with software engineers, but then the company has become more big-businesses-oriented. And it’s now that the wind of change starts blowing.
The event took place at Moscone West, a well known venue in San Francisco, spacious enough to host a conference many times as big as Index — therefore, the last thing you can say is that it was crowded, despite the number of attendees.
What surprised me most — in a positive way — was that although around half of the talks were from IBM people, none of those that I attended were sales pitches whatsoever. Instead, they were truly developer-oriented, and if it wasn’t for the company-themed slides and some lengthy mandatory disclaimers, you wouldn’t be able to tell that the talks were given by the employees of the main organizer.
Code patterns and the IBM Cloud
It turns out that IBM has already made some steps towards becoming developer friendly. Have you heard of Code patterns? It turns out to be a huge library of code samples which demostrate how to use the numerous services provided by the IBM Cloud — with comprehensive tutorials and full source code available. The cloud itself has a free plan, so you can easily explore tools like Watson and many others.
For those who are into blockchain (and who is not these days?), there is the IBM Blockchain, powered by Hyperledger Fabric — a blockchain framework implementation hosted by The Linux Foundation, released earlier in 2017, to which IBM has contributed significantly. And there’s a number of code samples to explore as well.
It’s also worth noting that IBM’s blockchain is not focused on cryptocurrencies, but rather on just running your smart contracts there. Additionaly, the blockchain is a private one, i.e. not publicly accessible by anyone. Permission needs to be granted for a participant to access the network at all, plus the transactions can be made visible only to particular entities.
The future is quantum
Did you know that IBM has been building a quantum computer? When you register for the IBM Q Experience, you will even be able to experiment with real quantum hardware yourself. You only need to know some Python to be able to play with the QISKit. There are also some resources available to help you get started if you’re a quantum computing newbie.
Yet another JVM is there
For quite some time now, IBM has been working on J9 — their proprietary JVM. It has recently been open-sourced and contributed to the Eclipse Foundation, thus becoming OpenJ9. I’m really not sure how better or worse than other JVMs it is, but there’s a number of resources which may help you compare and decide yourself.
My talk at Index
While not as advanced as quantum computing, my talk still covered the recent advancements in the JDK. Starting from JDK 9, there’s an out-of-the-box support for Reactive Streams — a standard for asynchronous stream processing with non-blocking back pressure. Feel free to have a look at the code and slides to see what you can (and can not) do with Reactive Streams in JDK 9+.
Summary
The first edition of Index has certainly proved that IBM is doing their best to once again become positively recognized in the developer community. With a lot of open-source contributions already available, I’m curious to see how this involvement is going to evolve.
