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I am an experienced developer, but am totally new to IoT. I am looking for a simple first project with detailed instructions in order to become familiar with the technology. Where can I find something like that? Thanks!
One spot you might find useful is this Coursera course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/developer-iot .
There are also lots of examples using the IBM IoT capabilities here (developerworks recipes): https://developer.ibm.com/recipes/tutorials/?s=iot .
This is pretty good: https://developer.ibm.com/recipes/tutorials/watson-conversation-ibm-cloud-functions-to-do-a-longtail-chatbot/