IBM Developer SF team hosts weekly online meetups on various topics. Online events are one of the best ways to scale your Developer Relations program and reach developers anywhere, anytime and for a long time after the event.

The following online meetups we hosted in September 2019 with links to watch the recordings. I also encourage you to join our meetup so you will always know when our online meetups are scheduled. Our meetups are hosted by the wonderful Lisa Jung 👋.

⭐ Build an Intelligent Chatbot with Watson and PubNub (September 7, 2019)

In this online meetup with Dave Nugentdevelopers learned:

• An introduction to the PubNub realtime network, channel architectures and the publish/subscribe paradigm
• A walkthrough of IBM Watson and Watson Assistant
• How to create an interactive chatbot
• Distributing your interactive chatbot globally with the PubNub realtime network
• Demo and Q&A

Watch the recording 📺

⭐ Natural Conversation Framework for Chatbots and Voice Assistants (September 11, 2019)

In order to help designers and developers build conversational agents, sociologists and UX designers at IBM Research-Almaden have developed a new design system: the Natural Conversation Framework (NCF). The NCF provides design concepts, principles and patterns adapted from the field of Conversation Analysis (CA), as well as a design thinking process, for conversational UX.

In this online meetup with Robert Moore developers learned:

• The difference between natural language and natural conversation
• Concepts and principles for conversational UX design
• A pattern language of 100 conversational interaction patterns
• An adaptation of design thinking to conversational UX design

Watch the recording 📺

⭐ Chat your way to a Faster Commute by IBM x TomTom (September 16, 2019)

Sick of wasting time in traffic on your commute when you could have taken BART? As a developer, you thought it might be hard to build something to help you “hack” your morning commute, but as it turns out, it’s not as hard as you thought.

You don’t even have to plan your route. Just ask Tom Watson!

The speaker Upkar Lidder from IBM Developer SF used to wonder how he might make his car-less commute easier from the East Bay to San Francisco. If there was an accident on the bay bridge, it would turn his 30 minute trip into a 90 minute trip. There had to be a better way to decide between risking the bus and the holdup or simply taking BART. Having to plan his route in order to make the train on time seemed like an arduous task.

If only Upkar had Tom Watson, like he does today!

Olivia Vahsen from TomTom just moved to the bay, and had the same question trying to navigate public transportation in the area.

To solve this daily annoyance, Upkar and Olivia created a simple, fun solution to a real world problem. Come check out how they used Apache OpenWhisk Serverless platform to integrate TomTom’s Traffic API to check for incidents, and Watson Assistant to build the conversation.

Watch the recording 📺

⭐ Build Cloud-Native Visual Recognition on Apache OpenWhisk (September 18, 2019)

In this hands-on online meetup with Dave Nugent developers learned:

• Lab1: Create, build, and run a cloud-native Node.js serverless app in less than 15 minutes
• Lab2: Create, build, and run a cloud-native Python 3 serverless application that uses the Visual Recognition service to determine image content
• Lab3: Create, build, and run three serverless functions as a sequence

Watch the recording 📺

⭐ To Serverless or Not – Pros and Cons of Going Serverless (September 25, 2019)

During this joint online meetup with Marek Sadowski from IBM Developer SF and Ben Greenberg from Nexmo they discuss Watson Natural Language Analyzer API & Ruby SDK on one hand, and about Mobile Backend as a Service on another. You will explore situations when your app requires extra information like Social Media input/output, a call to RESTful APIs, or simply Cloud based AI like IBM Watson. There is a well established practice of spinning services in a cloud, but a new serverless tactic is emerging!

During this online meetup you will discover a small Rails app that uses both the Watson Natural Language Analyzer API and the Nexmo Messages API to analyze the tone and sentiment of the daily headlines in a news topic the user provides and send a WhatsApp summary message to their phone number.

Watch the recording 📺

⭐ Introduction to IBM Blockchain Platform 2.0 – Build your own insurance app (September 26, 2019)

In this online meetup with Ayush Man from IBM Developer Dubai developers learned how to build a full functional blockchain insurance application.

Watch the recording 📺