Loopback HackathonUnder the aegis of iHaxLabs, NextGen Common Europe and N2i COMMON North America proudly present our first joint event “Loopback Hackathon”.
This virtual event will bring together worldwide students, early career employees and new developers of IBM i on Power Systems to enhance their application development skills.
Mark Irish, Advisory Software Developer from IBM has fine tuned the LoopBack framework for making REST APIs using Node.js and TypeScript on the IBM i. He will lead this 3-Day event with two days of education on LoopBack, its background theory, and security, and will hold a limited seats Hackathon for creating the REST APIs on third day.
Mark Irish
Advisory Software Developer, IBM Rochester, USA
Mark Irish is an Advisory Software Developer at IBM in Rochester, Minnesota working primarily on open-source software enablement on IBM i. He has a particular fondness for Node.js, but has also worked on PHP, Python, Ansible, and machine learning packages, all freely available on IBM i. Since 2019, Mark has been a frequent speaker at conferences across the United States and Europe. Feel free to talk to Mark about your open-source questions and tell him what open-source software you’d like to see on IBM i!
Tuesday 17 January 09:00 – 10:00 am Central (16:00 – 17:00 hours CET)
LoopBack: Background and Technology Stack
LoopBack is a framework for making REST APIs using Node.js and TypeScript. This one-hour session will give a short preview of LoopBack and highlight some of its strengths before delving into the underlying technology stack that makes all of the magic possible. If you are concerned that creating REST APIs with open-source software is too confusing or has too many moving parts, this session will help lay those fears to rest (pun intended).
Wednesday 18 January 09:00 – 10:00 am Central (16:00 – 17:00 hours CET)
LoopBack: Theory, Security, and Demo
Once we understand the underlying technology, it is time to understand the various components that make a LoopBack application work. We will talk about connectors, data sources, repositories, controllers, and more. But I will also highlight how many of these components are generated for you, and you don’t have to touch them unless you really want to customize your application. I will also cover the principles behind securing your REST APIs, such as using TLS certificates and authentication schemes. After this session, you will have all of the knowledge you need to create REST APIs in the Hackathon.
Thursday 19 January 09:00 – 11:00 am Central (16:00 – 18:00 hours CET)
LoopBack Hackathon: Creating your REST APIs is as easy as C L I
Co-host Koen Decorte, CD-Invest
On day three, we will finally get to program our REST APIs! In this hackathon, you will be provided instructions to create your own REST APIs to serve up your application data through an interface that other applications, no matter their underlying technology, can reliably consume. You will quickly see that one of the most powerful parts of LoopBack is that the CLI (command line interface) takes care of most of the heavy lifting for you! By the end of the hackathon, you will have fully functional and secure API endpoints, and the knowledge to use LoopBack to create API endpoints for you own business cases!