Reflections on Winning Second Place in the Bluemix Challenge

As a finalist in the IBM Bluemix Federal Challenge I was honored to present at the IBM Federal Cloud Innovation Center (FCIC) on Tuesday, December 9th. The Bluemix Challengers developed web apps using the new IBM Bluemix PaaS (Platform as a Service) and open government data. The Challenge asked participants to focus on either public safety, national parks, or rural American. I created an app using Bootstrap, jQuery, Node js, and a Cloudant database to help women farmers locate the grants and loans available to them. Here is a link to my presentation: http://bit.ly/1BqLfHR

The IBM Bluemix platform is a disruptive technology that allows users to create apps and use a pay-as-you-go model to access a wide variety of middleware and services, such as database management systems, mobile services, and web applications. This can drastically reduce the cycle time in creating and app and deploying it to production. This was clearly the case in my personal experience. My first exposure to Bluemix was October 28th and I presented my app at the FCIC event on December 9th, only 6 weeks. More details about the event are on my blog: http://bit.ly/1s2IDQr

I’m looking forward to continuing to iterate my app and showcasing it at the GovExec.com event “How Cloud is Driving Tomorrow’s Digital Government” on January 27, 2015.

I am grateful to the WIT (Women In Technology) DC organization for introducing me to the Bluemix Challenge and also grateful to the support from the IBM professionals that coached me through the process.

I’ve learned about programming and creating apps through my experience with Bluemix and have found it to be user-friendly, yet very powerful. To learn more about Bluemix reference the links below.

https://www.ng.bluemix.net/docs/#

https://developer.ibm.com/bluemix/