If I had time on my hands…

I dream of having time on my hands.  Ah, what would I do to occupy myself if I was a high-school kid dreaming to get a start in software development?

Knowing what I know now about how complicated developing software can get, I would try to do something very simple.  In fact, I would want to make it as simple as possible.

First, I would avoid one of the least productive and most complicated parts of software development — setting up my development and test environments.   I would look at developing in the cloud using a Platform as a Service (PaaS) such as IBM’s Bluemix.

Secondly, I would do it for free as much as possible.  In luck…IBM provides a free DevOps and PaaS services!

Sign up for free IBM DevOps Services and free trial for Bluemix.

Create a DevOps project.  I created a Git repository (https://hub.jazz.net/git/alanstreet/)

Copy the sample project as described here, fork it, and build & deploy it as instructed.  Run a test!