6 Months? Has it Been that Long?

Not since I blogged, but since we left the US.

August 12^th we picked up the family and the labrador and moved to Israel. And it has been the best thing we have done in years.

Many of my friends at the IBM event formerly known as Lotusphere in Orlando remarked how much happier I seemed, that I must be enjoying myself. The truth, of course, is not as rosy as Facebook posts, but there is much truth to it nonetheless.

Life is different. You get used to creature comforts in the US that just do not exist in Israel. No Amazon Prime, Target, Walmart or similar customer service. And yes I did shop a bit to bring things back for everyone, but in general, I don’t expect to do it this way. Like adoption of a new product, you can’t just go cold turkey.

We gained nearly unlimited places to eat at, finally, and a bakery on every corner that makes our little city just smell awesome, even on rainy days. Fresh Danish or bread can’t be beat.

Admittedly my Hebrew is still not where I would like it to be, it is coming back to me. The kids are getting more integrated and surviving their trial by fire of classes in Hebrew. The dog, well, she just doesn't speak whatever language the local dogs speak. But there are cats and she is happy chasing them.

The pinball machine survived and is getting operated on to be converted to 240 from 110.

Our cost of living is about half of what it was in Boca. While my salary fluctuates based on the projects I work on, and please feel free to let me know if you need any help, we have been getting out to see things more over here. There is no shortage of sights, museums, caves, parks to see and experience. There are also distilleries, breweries and wineries waiting for us.

Our friends in Rehovot have been great and welcoming and we look forward to do the same for the next people to arrive in our neck of the woods.

Yes, we did go beet picking, on archaeological digs, spelunking through a stalactite cave, hang out by the ocean in Jaffa, go up to the North and look out on the Mediterranean and of course to Jerusalem and all that it offers.

More places to go and see and learn about, the list is very long. But there is also business. I have been going to various meetups, events, seminars from Google, IBM, RackSpace, SalesForce and others related to startups, founders, marketing and the travel industry. While I would like to do more work in Israel, IBM Verse will not do BiDi (BI-Directional languages) until 3 months after GA, this part of being here is the slowest. It takes time to get to know, and be known, by the people you are seeking to work with or consult.

And today I am at the FIRST Robotics competition in Ra'anana, will post more on that in a day or two. Third time as a Robot Inspector, first time doing it in Israel. Can't wait to see what the kids come up with for this year's event. (Panorama shot, click on the picture to see it in full)

After the show in Orlando I went to visit my family in Boca and saw some friends. Those I missed, sorry I could not be everywhere, but for those I did see, I’m not the Aliyah cheerleader. The same percentage of people that love Manhattan, or prefer the frozen tundra of upstate New York, are the same people that just feel more comfortable when in Israel. It is cult like, for sure, but then so is any religion, be it spiritual or based around a business solution.

If you have a chance to come over and visit Israel let me know. It is not all sand and desert. It is oranges and rosemary, industry and business, the cross roads between the new and the old world.

And we have Kosher Tim Tams. 

My BlueMix Day of Coding

I rarely code anymore, but when I found out about this class, not far from me in Israel, I figured why not check it out.

Last time I did something like this was at IBM Impact 2 years ago when I sat in on a Worklight development hands on session.

Which was more useful? Bluemix is this year's iPhone from IBM and Worklight is a bit quieter.

Bluemix is a term loosely translated to me as "Websphere lite". Why do I say this? There are a lot of pieces to make this environment come together. Not sure how much of it is IBM or the architecture that requires so much, but as an Admin, it does not make me happy to see/hear there are so many moving pieces. As a developer, maybe you are used to this aspect. Yes I come from a silo coding world, so sociliaze me. Chris Sparshott of IBM did nice slides on the pieces.

The class was an all day event, 9-4, I had to skip out the last hour to get home for parent night at school, but we were done coding by then. We opened with a slide deck in English and the instructor presented it all in Hebrew. I may have missed some terminology or aspects, and any Bluemix people want to correct me I appreciate it.

I tried to get a picture of one slide which looked like this:

You may prefer this slidedeck, it is not the one I saw, but will enlighten you farther than I could ever explain it.

Once we got the introductions out of the way it was time to get coding. Well time to first find the pieces we would need.

Bluemix ID, Jazz ID, IBM ID, check. Oh the Bluemix ID is only good for 60 days then you need to pay for access. More on this later.

GitHub is the first stop, go get the files for the class. Fork them over, boil till ready then copy to your local drive. No doubt developers do this in their sleep, admins, we just look at this like it is another foreign language. Yes I have had an account at Github for a while, but I don't code so it was to tinker with some ideas. I followed directions and was amused at how much DOS is still in use. Sorry you all call it a command prompt or terminal.

Great so we have some file. Now what? Go get 2-3 other bits of pieces, and load them into Bluemix. Right, how? I asked the woman sitting next to me for help and she also had problems following. First rule of doing live demos, reset your machine or do it in a VM that can easily be cleaned up. Instructor had all the defaults found for him, but these got worked out and we moved on to the next part.

When we got into the BueMix environment we found there is a 2GB memory limit of usage. We were constantly deleting apps on screen, I at least, wondered how much memory we needed, or if I deleted the right one every time.

Coding involves various drag and drop bits and pieces which you can include. Some things like Twitter have already been included for you to play with feeds and searches easily. In general, I found it to be an easy way to code, if one knew what they were doing. I am still a bit confused about all the preliminary work we did, downloaded and setup(we used MYSQL, but I don't have it on my laptop, so not sure how that works). Naturally I wanted to integrate Domino in here but there is nothing there just yet. Perhaps at IBM ConnectED in January we will see/hear more about it. Then again, if one really wanted a fast development platform that could be used across the board, IBM Domino is still out there. Nathan Freeman had a similar question on his blog.

We eventually made it through to the coding part and made a little parking app. Mine is sitting out here, https://care.mybluemix.net, for the next 57 days or so. Cute enough and worked on my S4 and laptop browsers. This doesn't get published yet to the IBM Appstore, IBM Cloud Marketplace. I understand only SoftLayer apps can be published here, but I may be wrong with that information.

I presume one can package the app, somehow, and make it available from the Apple and Google stores as well.

My questions for IBM and the product management team:

Pricing to use BlueMix after 60 days, in my opinion limits development. On the other hand, you can sign up with multiple accounts and use it for another 60 days, just without your code. As an IBM Business Partner I would like to think we can have accounts that do not expire or cost us, much, money. The people I contacted had no idea if there was such a BP option. Anyone know?

Having all these pieces of a puzzle relying on SoftLayer, URLs, and version control seems like a lot of failure points to me. Just wondering about it.

Pricing for using BlueMix did not show up on screen, for my over 60 days account, just asking for a credit card, but no amount. Please let people know what it costs.

Speaking of costs, you can see what your built app might cost from inside BlueMix. To me it looks like a nickel and dime effort when all I want to know is how much to host my app every month. Who knew there were large and small push/pull requests. Right, you developers should, but do you really watch the costs? I think this could be done in an easier fashion so that the business line people could understand their budget hits. After all, I doubt the developers look at the bills.

It was fun overall, and when I had the right code, logins and things turned on, or running at all, it all went well.

I will now leave developer land again until the next time, like next Tuesday, when I go to Google's Cloud day and get a different perspective.