We are all familiar with the saying: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life”. Who does not love sharing some knowledge (along with some pizza) with the rest of their colleagues?

The purpose of a sponge is to absorb water, which is primarily the function of a Z Bee at IBM. Well, not to absorb water but to absorb as much knowledge about the IBM mainframe as we can. This knowledge is acquired through e-learning resources, seminars held by experts in the business and technical sessions run by experienced facilitators that require hands-on participation. We then demonstrate what we have learnt by presenting to our fellow Z Bees. An example of this is the Pizza Ordering code pattern session that was facilitated by Siyasanda Ndongeni, Patience Madisha, Phiwe Pohleli, Dieketseng Mahlatsi and I. We walked through the process of assembling a pizza ordering chatbot with the rest of the Z Bees.

The aim of our presentation was to give our colleagues a taste of what code patterns are (and pizza) by creating a complex dialog with Watson Assistant, Node.js and IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. Each member of our team managed to run the chatbot application written in Node.js which pushed all the logic into Watson Assistant via the new Watson Assistant Slots feature. The chatbot accepts a pizza order through a few steps of dialogue and fills in slots for the various information required. Once all the requirements of the pizza order are satisfied, the chatbot confirms the order. As an additional perk, this chatbot will not judge you for your choice of food unlike the other chatbots out there.

I must confess that the Z Bees did not actually get to eat pizza, however, their hunger for knowledge was surely satisfied.