Developers Erashad Kurawle, Nicole McGuire, and Nick Woodcox collaborated on this account of their experiences both participating in this year’s Dev Camp and working for Bluewolf and IBM.

Dev Camp is 72 hours of developing, learning, creating, and collaborating. As we enter the building, we see men and women, people who have traveled from near and far to be here. We’ve all come together from both Bluewolf and IBM because we love what we do and want to be even better. We’re here for the opportunity to learn from the best and work with the best over the next three days.

The first day was spent learning about the IBM Watson suite of tools in an informative session by Shobhit Bansal. Watson is a set of Artificial Intelligence, cognitive computing, and Business Intelligence tools from IBM. Bansal gave us a demo on using Watson in conjunction with Service Cloud and Salesforce CRM to boost agent productivity in a call center. The day ended with fun and games on the hotel lawn where we spent some time with our colleagues over drinks.

The next day, we spent time learning about Salesforce Lightning from knowledge expert JF Paradis. He taught us about how to develop Salesforce solutions utilizing the latest Salesforce Lightning technology with Salesforce Lightning Design Studio (SLDS). After our session on Lightning we were split into 12 teams to develop a solution utilizing the concepts we had just learned.

We had been given a list of topics to choose from a few weeks before the hackathon. Our team had chosen Open Topic because we had a unique idea in mind. The goal of our project idea, Watson Source Our Specialists or Watson S.O.S., was to solve the resource allocation problem at Bluewolf using cutting edge technologies. We received instant approval upon submission of our project idea. Next we worked on the project plan and technical solution for our project. We knew we would only be allocated 12 hours during the hackathon to build a working prototype of our tool. When we arrived at Dev Camp, it was time to put our fingers on the keyboard and bring our idea to life.

We split into three sub-teams:
1) Watson services:
We used Watson Natural language processing and cognitive capabilities. We asked Watson questions in Natural language and Watson was able to provide accurate answers to our questions based on its cognitive learning capability.
2) Lightning:
We used the latest Salesforce Lightning technologies of application, components, and Salesforce Lightning Design Studio (SLDS).  With Salesforce Lightning, the solution is mobile friendly, available from anywhere, designed for a better user experience, and includes performance optimizations.
3) Database:
We scrapped resumes on LinkedIn for current Bluewolf employees. This unstructured data was parsed and fed to Watson for its cognitive learning using PDF file formats. We then trained Watson using the tooling it provides by asking it questions and ranking the responses Watson gave us. Training Watson is a time consuming and tiring process, but the end results were fantastic and highly satisfying. Once Watson was trained, it was able to spit relevant results back in no time. The fact that it can keep applying its machine learning capabilities and improve on its own knowledge base is amazing!

In the end, we won the hackathon with Watson S.O.S. We each received an Amazon Echo, but agreed that the real prize was the pride and happiness we got out of winning the competition and defeating 11 other teams. The hackathon and its results are just a small part of why it’s such an exciting time to be part of the Bluewolf and IBM family. We are excited as developers to be learning how to use all the tools now at our disposal and to bring exciting solutions to our customers.

Artificial intelligence is the future of computing. Getting our hands dirty with cutting edge technologies on Artificial Intelligence, cognitive learning and Business Intelligence in such a unique scenario was a great experience and we thank Bluewolf for giving us this awesome learning opportunity.

Final thoughts from each of us:
Erashad: Food was delicious, drinks were plenty, technology was cutting edge, bonding was visible, fun was evident, and the experience was priceless.

Nicole: Being new to Bluewolf, the Dev Camp 2016 was a great time to put names to faces, learn from some of the best, and showcase our talents. The Bluewolf Dev Camp Team made sure that we learned, competed, and had fun too! Thank you for the great opportunity to be part of this event!

Nick: I had a great time hanging out with all the people I work with sharing ideas and catching up on what has been going on at Bluewolf.  Bluewolf took care of us with lodging and food and great organization so I didn’t have to think about anything but the tech work.  You feel like you are part of something bigger than just you and your daily work and get to collaborate with like minded friends and co workers.

Want to work with these incredible technologies and people? See open opportunities here: http://www.bluewolf.com/pack