Meet Kevin Dubois, Senior Principal Developer Advocate at Red Hat.

Kevin is a Java Champion, keynote speaker, cloud-native developer, open source contributor, and author!

In this episode, we discussed two hackathons organized by Red Hat. The first was an AI Hackathon at the University of Brussels, long before AI became a hype. It featured an interesting concept with gamification where teams trained their AI for a shooting game. After two days of building and training the model, the third day was all about combat! We also talked about how hackathons can increase the adoption of your platform. These hackathons, called Deep Dive Sessions, focus on helping customers execute better on specific and important use cases with the help of your technology.

Additionally, we discussed what typically slows down development velocity. According to Kevin, the major issues include 1) configuration—setting up the local environment and getting everything to work correctly, 2) automation, and 3) finding necessary documentation, figuring out responsibilities, and creating tickets.

Here are the links to some of the projects we discussed in the podcast: 

quarkus.io - Java framework that puts developer experience as a top concern

backstage.io - an open source developer portal building tool to centralize developer resources and automate the creation of new projects

developers.redhat.com/rhdh - the Red Hat implementation of the backstage project 

developers.redhat.com/products/red-hat-openshift-ai - Openshift AI, the platform we used for the hackathon with the Brussels University (ULB)

instructlab.ai - the tool to fine tune models using plain yaml text files allowing you to contribute knowledge and skills back to AI models such as the IBM Granite models.

podman-desktop.io - UI interface for working not only with containers but also to run AI models on your local machine very easily