IBM Bluemix and Vaadin are doing it right - the challenge
I’m a big fan of Vaadin as an UI framework as readers of my blog may have noticed. And I like what IBM is doing in the Bluemix space. Now they’ve joined for a challenge (or contest as some may say).
The challenge itself contains of nine tasks. Some give you fixed boundaries to interact in, others not. The list of tasks is freely available here. You can see how many people have submitted a task for review below the “person” image on the left side. The description of each task is available when you’re logged in - and when you’re done with the previous task. No spoilers here. ;-)
You can earn 100 points on each task - so 900 points is the maximum you can get.
Prizes you can win are an Apple Watch (1st place), an iPad Air 2 WiFi (2nd place) and a GoPro camera (3rd place). But the prizes shouldn’t be the reason to take part…
The people from Vaadin have already a kind of history with IBM Bluemix as they supplied the first 3rd party boilerplate on that platform (read here and here).
See this video on the IBM Cloud Ecosystem YouTube channel for a first information about both companies/services.
So why are they doing it right as I’ve stated in the title of my blog? There are two main reasons from my point of view.
It’s good marketing
Altogether it’s a marketing campaign - for both companies. It’s about showing the technology to a broad audience. And the different competition tasks touch a broad variety of tools and services that both companies (may) charge for. Those include Vaadin Designer, Vaadin Charts and Bluemix services. That’s IMHO a good thing as both companies make their living out of the chargeable stuff (remember: the Vaadin framework itself is free and Apache licensed). And some people probably wouldn’t have normally touched or tested those tools/services.
Mixing easy and advanced
As said before the challenge tasks are sometimes in boundaries and sometimes not. For some it’s quite easy to get a result - but question is if it’s the desired result. The easy part is all about doing it as stated in the descriptions. The advanced (or harder) part is to read between the lines - and to start fiddling around with the involved technologies.
Broad variety of topics involved
That’s the best part - the fun part - in my opinion. When taking part on the challenge you’ll touch a lot of stuff that’s not directly/obviously related to IBM Bluemix and/or Vaadin. Here is an excerpt of technologies that you’ll (have to) learn about:
- Maven (I prefer Gradle, but that’s another story)
- Vaadin basics
- IBM WebSphere Liberty (my favorite Java app server nowadays)
- CloudFoundry basic
- the IBM Design methodology
- …
I’m currently working on task 5 - and I’ve to admit that it’s fun to dig into IBM Design.
Still found no reason to give it a try? If you’re based in Switzerland or the Czech Republic I may convince you personally as I’ll speak about Vaadin at the Switzerland Notes User Group meeting and the Czech Lotus User Group meeting
