Below we have collated a list of material that we hope participants will find useful to get up and running quickly.
Make sure to sign up here for the Bluemix 30 day free trial. Once you have done this we will request team names and email addresses, we will then upgrade these accounts to fully managed and supported ones.
Please start by watching these introductory videos:
Cloud Foundry is the open-source platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that Bluemix is built upon. This platform allows you to concentrate on your code without worrying about the underlying infrastructure (like setting up virtual machines (VMs) or containers). That allows you to get your apps up and running quickly... which makes it an ideal environment for a coding competition.
Here's a link to get you started: Creating Cloud Foundry apps
If you prefer a more structured course, here is a link to a 4-hour online class to get you started with Bluemix: Bluemix Essentials
For additional start-up guides please see the following here and here.
If you're working with others as part of a team, you'll probably want to use a collaborative coding tool like github and maybe also automate and orchestrate testing, notifications and deployments. The toolchain feature is meant to do exactly that. Click here to find out how to use it.
In addition here is a very quick start-up to getting a node.js app up and running but more importantly it shows you how you can integrate with GIT and use Bluemix’s WEB IDE code editor to autodeploy your application
If you want to work to an IoT theme, you'll want to learn Node-RED. It's an open-source "visual tool for wiring the Internet of Things" and a great way to quickly become productive in a very short period of time. It also requires very little coding knowledge.
Node-RED can be deployed on Bluemix with a single click.. Here is a great example of how to build a real-time chat app with Node-RED in 5 minutes!
Next, learn more about our IoT platform service. Once you understand how it works, go to this link here to find step-by-step instructions to connect your physical devices (like a Rasperry Pi, an Arduino or TI Sensor Tag).
Most coding competition participants want to take our IBM Watson services for a spin. Here are two detailed tutorials on how to integrate a cognitive service into your app:
Here is the link to all the Bluemix online classes from IBM: developerWorks Courses
To really dive deep, you might want to take "Cloud Application Developer Certification Preparation", which should take you two or three days: Cloud Application Developer Certification Preparation
And if you're looking for more, here is a link to over 400 detailed step-by-step coding tutorials for Bluemix.
Looking for some inspiring examples? Here is a gallery of 20 well documented apps built on Bluemix. All of them with a cognitive capability and based on the Watson technology. Each has a link to the running app and also links to the source on github.
And here are almost 500 apps built on Bluemix from hackathons around the world, many linking to the source code.
Make sure to search the Bluemix docs first.
Still stuck? Head on over to stackoverflow.com and make sure to tag your question with "bluemix". Here is a direct link.
There are plenty of freely available Bluemix resources stored in github.