About this event
Botmasters! Our loyal sponsor Microsoft will be hosting a workshop at Cross Campus Downtown with evangelist Daniel Egan teaching you how to build a bot. This is a great way to get prepared for the Botathon coming up on September 10-11th in Santa Monica.
Bots (or conversation agents) are rapidly becoming an integral part of one’s digital experience – they are as vital a way for users to interact with a service or application as is a web site or a mobile experience. Developers writing bots all face the same problems: bots require basic I/O; they must have language and dialog skills, and they must connect to users – preferably in any conversation experience and language the user chooses. The Bot Framework provides tools to easily solve these problems and more for developers e.g., automatic translation to more than 30 languages, user, and conversation state management, debugging tools, an embeddable web chat control and a way for users to discover, try, and add bots to the conversation experiences they love. There are Channels for Facebook Messenger, Email, Kik, Twilio, GroupMe, Skype, Slack, Web in order to have you connect to as many users as possible.
In this hands-on workshop, which means bring your laptop, we will talk about some basic building blocks needed to create a bot and then start right into a hands-on lab where you can build your own bot. Hopefully, you can take what you learn and use It to compete in the Bot-A-Thon 1.0
You can bring your Mac or PC and can write your bot in either Node.js or C# (there is also a REST api, but we won't have a hands-on lab for that). If you have never written a bot before, then this is the event for you. If you have written a bot before, then come and check out Microsofts bot platform.
About the Speaker
Originally from Chicago Daniel moved to California in the early 90′s right when the Bulls were scorching the NBA. Before joining Microsoft, Daniel held a variety of positions in the information technology and engineering fields. At his company, Odyssey Consulting Group, he served as Chief Architect and CEO. OCG did custom application development for Mid-Range companies in Southern California. He has always been active in the developer community and was the Co-Founder of the SoCalDotNet Developers Group. In addition, he also had the unique opportunity to serve as President of INETA, the international .Net association. Currently Daniel is playing with all things open source and taking a journey through Node.js and IoT.