IBM’s Recipes community

For some time, I’ve been worrying that ibm’s profile with new, young, developers isn’t as high as it should be. microsoft is no longer the only game in town – in fact, it never was, but there was a time when microsoft developers would tell me that no-one was using java and that c# was the future. while big corporations were crying out for more java programmers. well, c# is still around, as is java, and developers with an eye to the future are looking to cross-platform and multiplatform development – and HTML5. It’s all part of the trend towards IT freedom.

IBM is waking up to the new developers on platforms like Bluemix and is actively promoting communities that are rather more interesting than the old corporate IBM comunities. This has been going on for some time, but I think its latest “Recipes” IoT community is really exciting.

IoT is the disruptive technology for the 21st century. Adapting legacy business IT techniques for IoT is not going to be a long-term solution; we need to transfer knowledge from the people (such as PTC) that have been doing systems engineering with IoT for years – and these IoT developers need access to business IT knowledge around business agility and consumer attitudes. 

According to IBM:

“Users of developerWorks Recipes can tap into IBM’s platform-as-a-service, Bluemix, to implement step-by-step tutorials for embedding advanced analytics and machine learning into IoT devices and applications. Examples include: 

• “Understanding vehicle performance by analyzing data from its On-Board Diagnostic system.
• “Linking real-time machine condition monitoring with IBM asset management to monitor everything from the health of household appliances to wheels on a railroad car.
• “Spotting trends and obtaining solutions to common problems through graphical representation of historical and real-time data from IoT devices.”

However, I hope it will do more than that. I think the knowledge transfer needs to be two-way – using the data from IoT in ways that are useful for the business will need actionable insights, implemented in a business context… I hope that some of the tutorials on Recipes will be around implementing a supportive human interface to IoT.