Extreme Blue is the premier internship program of IBM aimed at creating innovative solutions for various clients. During 12 intense weeks, students get the opportunity to work full-time with real-life clients and experienced mentors to produce a prototype (or in this case a product) that addresses the client’s challenges.
This post outlines the process of creating the AG Memorial Van Damme mobile application. AG Insurance, the largest insurance company in Belgium, is the title sponsor of the Memorial Van Damme 2015. The Memorial Van Damme is the final of the IAAF Diamond League and the largest annual athletics event in Belgium, taking place at the King Baudouin Stadium in Brussels.
The Extreme Blue teams usually adhere to a pre-determined schedule that spans 12 weeks. This project was a special case as it accelerated several steps in order to deliver a complete product to AG Insurance in only 7 weeks. The first week was spent on creating the team and meeting the client who explained their needs. After a second week of brainstorming and selecting a concept with AG Insurance, the Extreme Blue team began developing the product. After four weeks of discussing technologies and building the product and two weeks of fine-tuning it, AG Insurance decided that they will push the application to the app store.
Used technologies
The team used Bluemix as the backbone of the AG Insurance Memorial Van Damme mobile application project. Not only because it is an IBM product but because it indeed allows fast production and provides a connection to countless top-notch services. These services include a whole catalogue of open source APIs and assets such as private clouds for mobile application development. Other factors were also important in this decision: the team’s technical mentors were Bluemix experts who could provide support against difficulties or issues that came up; there was also the very valuable advantage that if something extra was needed (e.g. extended storage space and load balancing) arrangements could be readily made available. The code sharing was performed via version control git repository (git stores information in a data structure called a repository) as a development operations service on Bluemix.
Aside of the main request of the client (the mobile application) we also produced a 50-page business case. The document explains our decisions like the choosen technologies or the challenges that we faced. It also offers future implementations possibilities to integrate in the application.
According to the schedule, the last week of the Extreme Blue program is focused on both the final presentation towards the client and the pitch at the European exposition. All european teams gathered this year in Amsterdam and had 5 minutes to present their solution.
Below is the poster that was showcased at the Extreme Blue expo in Amsterdam.
