As a developer advocate with IBM Bluemix, Anton McConville (@antonmc) applies his UX and engineering background to design data-centric apps like Ziggy - which applies algorithms from Watson to "decode" the various career personas of David Bowie.

Ziggy is a Python app that draws from decades of Bowie albums and related data, analyzing his entire artistic output to do what the world could never seem to do - uncover consistent themes behind Bowie’s constantly shifting stage personas.

In Episode 9 of The New Builders, we, along with IBM Developer Advocate Maureen McElaney (@Mo_Mack), interview Anton, to learn about the genesis of the Ziggy app (5:00); how he learned to use Watson Personality Insights and why he incorporated it into Ziggy (8:01); what Ziggy reveals about the personality traits in Bowie’s various career personas (12:08); the data architecture of the Ziggy app (17:35); the inspiration behind Ziggy’s unique visual design (20:20); and how and why Anton and his team coded the Ziggy app using Python, HTML, and CSS (26:40).

Anton will be presenting his Ziggy project at GitHub CodeConf 2016, June 27-29, in Los Angeles.

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Cloud Data Services at IBM.biz/forbuilders. Contact hosts Doug Flora and Jim Young on Twitter (@DSFlora, @JW_Young) or email ([email protected], [email protected]).

The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!