IBM releases code patterns, resources to accelerate IoT development

Aiming to ease and accelerate development around technologies like IoT, IBM this week released more than 120 code patterns, along with online community enhancements that pair developers with educational content and live experts.

The curated packages of code, one-click GitHub repos, documentation and resources include patterns for blockchain, AI, containers and several IoT applications. Some IoT patterns include resources for developing an IoT application with Node-RED and Watson, building and monitoring an IoT-driven conveyor belt and detecting change points in IoT sensor data.

IBM has added the patterns and resources on its IBM Coder Community, and also launched a new community for building bots – “The IBM Bot Asset Exchange.” It provides domain-specific conversation logic to deploy bots that use IBM Watson Conversation to any platform, as well as the opportunity for developers to earn rewards for engaging in the community.

“What we have learned over the past year and a half, is there’s a new era of patterns emerging,” said Angel Diaz, vice president, developer technology and advocacy, IBM. “The crux of what we’ve done here … is to allow developers to not think about some of the more complicated stuff … so that they can implement their applications faster.” 

The initiatives will help developers confront one of their biggest challenges today – innovating with a proliferation of technologies at the speed digital transformation demands, according to Diaz. Developers today work in a space where several major shifts in technology are occurring simultaneously – the cloud, big data, AI and blockchain Diaz called that paradigm the “democratization” of infrastructure, data, AI and transaction capabilities.

“These four things happening at once make it very challenging,” Diaz said. “There isn’t a developer (or very few) on earth who understands all of those, and our enterprise clients want to take advantage of all of them to change the state of the art.”

Key to the effort is the IBM Coder Community built to facilitate, share best practices and innovate on the code to accelerate the deployment of these technologies. The community is free to join. It includes everything from gaming, in which participants earn coins toward t-shirts and gear for contributions, to technical learning paths that bring together code, content and community to guide developers through specific technologies like IoT and blockchain, to even enabling interested developers to be paired with IBM developers, called “advocates” who wrote the code to ask questions and provide expertise.

“These are the people who know the most about this new technology, it’s the glue between the code and the human,” Diaz said.