“With Great Power comes Great Responsibility”. I remember first hearing this phrase in Spider Man comics. But it has a much longer history than that. Wikipedia indicates that this is actually an ancient phrase going back to the first century BC. I find that IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management’s (IBM ELM’s) incredible flexibility and power is a lot like this phrase.
You have great power in integrating the ELM capabilities with other tools and processes, but you are responsible for understanding a lot of basic concepts.
There’s a lot of existing content available on our API page, but it can be overwhelming if you are not familiar with the applications and some basic concept. So over the course of this blog series I plan on going thru the major APIs across ELM applications, while also explaining some of the basic concepts behind how to understand our APIs.
Having said all this, let me introduce myself. My name is Michael Rowe, and I’ve been at IBM since 1995. In that time I’ve had many roles across development, product management, IBM research, services, and strategy. In my spare time I develop iOS apps for fun, podcast on gaming and technology, swim and sing light opera. You can follow those topics over at my personal blog – https://michaelrowe01.com. I joined IBM Rational in 2008 and focused on brand level strategy, looking at how we integrate with other IBM brands (like Tivoli), across the development lifecycle (Urban Code for DevOps, WorkLight for Mobile app development), and with business partners. I moved to IBM research for a few years to help identify technologies which could and should be brought into products, coming back to the Watson IoT business unit in 2017 to help drive strategy. I have worked with business partners for a few years and in 2021 came back to my technical roots by joining our ELM Architecture team with a focus on APIs.
I have experienced the same learning curve that many of you will be experiencing as you get started learning how to access and understand our APIs, and as such, we will take this journey together. My personal approach to learning is to read, in order to understand a concept, and then attempt to validate what I read by performing a simple exercise. Some of the concepts that we leverage in ELM may require multiple exercises.
My goal is to help you quickly get thru the concepts and find the APIs you need to better leverage the IBM ELM capabilities. Over time, I will be working closely with our product manager, Jim Ruehlin (link – https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/Main/JimRuehlin) , to address API documentation and clarity, but more on that in a future post.
I look forward to hearing from you…so let’s get started…