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Introduce yourself! Who are you? Where do you work?
Hi, my name is Cong and I'm a developer advocate at IBM. As a dev advocate, well, there are a lot of definitions of it; but what I do day-to-day is around client support, and making sure demos and labs the sales teams deliver across are succinct and resonates well with the developers. Outside of those engagements, I tend to find myself trying to write presentations or code on something that can be showcased in a meetup or conference.
Who or what got you into technology?
Laziness - "How do I spend the least amount of energy doing repetitive tasks" - and cost optimisation - "Can I do this cheaply?". Often times, the act of automating a task takes way more time and money than actually just manually doing the task, but I occasionally find this enjoyable.
Back in my uni days (2014), I spent a lot of time designing and developing USB/Bluetooth hybrid controllers for the ThinkPad T60 keyboard, instead of just buying an existing ThinkPad keyboard for $129AUD and modding it. I got to learn about Bluetooth Low Energy protocol, developing embedded applications in C and designing PCBs (all the IoT goodness). This landed my first electronics engineering "job" and built up my portfolio for my current job, but it also most of the $ from the casual jobs at the time. In hindsight, I should probably have invested in ETFs and tech stocks. The project is here.
Forward 3 years (2017-2018), I started to play Tribal Wars 2, and well, started to automate certain time-intensive activities of the game. It started as Javascript snippets that I'd run in Chrome. Over time, I picked up new skills to try to automate it better, not only the act of doing things but also to have the computer make decisions for me. This led me to learn about Docker, 12-factor app development, MATLAB, multi-objective optimisation, BPMN, microservices, BI, ESB (lots of enterprise tech) etc. This project jump-started my career at IBM. It was fun to do, fun to talk and fun to showcase. I gave a talk about this at CampJS X in 2019. I am never playing Tribal Wars 2 again. It's the biggest time hog I've come across.
Now, I'm looking into how I can use knowledge graphs, something like Grakn, IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding, IBM Watson Speech-to-Text perhaps a tiny bit of some sort of image segmentation, to improve my gameplay as a Teemo main in League of Legends. I watch a lot of YouTube videos from one-trick Teemo players. They often drop knowledge bombs for the champion - how do you vs. that champion, what runes to get, what items to get and why. I'd like to curate that knowledge and get something going to prompt starting items and recommendations as I play the game. I don't know how this will turn out. But hey, tech is fun!
Tell us about Call For Code - what is it?
Call for Code is a global tech-for-good hackathon. There are 2 challenges, each with their own categories.
COVID-19:
Crisis communication
Remote education
Community cooperation
Climate change
Water sustainability
Energy sustainability
Disaster Resiliency
The prizes include:
Grand prize $200K USD with IBM helping your team to deliver the solution through to production, as part of our Code and Response initiative.
First and second runner-up: $25K USD
Third and fourth runner-up: $10K USD
For universities, the prizes include:
Grand prize: $10K USD, and opportunity for students to get interviewed for roles @ IBM.
Runner up: interview opportunity.
To enter a submission, you will need to use IBM Cloud or IBM Systems (think Infrastructure-as-a-Service). The judging criteria has 4 dimensions:
Completeness and transferability
Effectiveness and efficiency
Design and usability
Creative and innovation
You can find more information at CallForCode.org. The final submission deadline is July 31st. The winners of 2020 Call for Code will be announced in October.
How can we get involved in Call For Code?
For details about the challenge, https://callforcode.org/challenge.
To submit your solution, https://callforcode.org/submit.
More generally, what can us technologists do to better serve society during times of Pandemic and other horrific global events?
Technologies enable the movement of data and increase the efficiency of everyday tasks. This question is a bit broad. I'd say, focus on the usability and user experience of your respective products and services to improve the conditions of living conditions of people in this difficult time.
How do you think developer relations will change with the pandemic, and how might that affect your role?
For me, developer relations is all about meeting people and talking to them at events. Being able to build rapport and a connection. Not being able to get out of the house has certainly impaired that relationship building piece. There are a lot of different things that grab people's attention these days. While the pandemic has taken away the human connection moments, it also gives me a lot of time at home to work on my hobby projects. Going forward, I'm seeing devrel for me, as doing a lot of writing, documentation and client work.
Congrats on your many IBM credentials! What should a developer consider when looking at gaining credentials, and what main benefits do they offer for one’s career?
Cheers! A developer should always be learning. IBM credentials are definitely a way but I would recommend, if you have time, I'd go for industry certifications like TOGAF, CNCF, Red Hat or Linux Foundation certificates.
What has been your toughest lesson to learn in your software career so far?
As per the previous question, it is important for a developer to keep learning. It’s important to keep updating your tech skills, but also interpersonal skills such as networking and negotiation play a huge part.
What would be your number one piece of advice for a successful software career?
Get solid and deep technical skills, do a few years in a corporate to get a broad sense of the industry you're in and business analysis skills along the way. Then break out to smaller businesses when you've identified what you'd like to do with your work life.
Have you got any hobbies outside of your job? Do you think they help your tech career in any way?
I'm learning jazz piano and Japanese. Working from home 24/7 abolished the typical 9 to 5 typical work schedule. *Cue Dolly Parton's 9 to 5 song*. I need some work-life balance. I doubt these would help my tech career in the short term, but hey you never know.