Sick of wasting time in traffic on your commute when you could have taken BART? As a developer, you thought it might be hard to build something to help you "hack" your morning commute, but as it turns out, it's not as hard as you thought.

You don't even have to plan your route. Just ask Tom Watson!

The speaker Upkar Lidder used to wonder how he might make his car-less commute easier from the East Bay to San Francisco. If there was an accident on the bay bridge, it would turn his 30 minute trip into a 90 minute trip. There had to be a better way to decide between risking the bus and the holdup or simply taking BART.  Having to plan his route in order to make the train on time seemed like an arduous task.

If only Upkar had Tom Watson, like he does today!

Olivia just moved to the bay, and had the same question trying to navigate public transportation in the area.

To solve this daily annoyance, Upkar and Olivia created a simple, fun solution to a real world problem. Come check out how they used Apache OpenWhisk Serverless platform to integrate TomTom's Traffic API to check for incidents, and Watson Assistant to build the conversation.

Olivia Vahsen is a Developer Evangelist for TomTom with a background in mobile game design and working with startups, bringing creative input from different areas of development. She has a passion for bridging communication practices and people-oriented design in the development process in a variety of mediums, and building genuine connections in the developer community.

Upkar Lidder is a Full Stack Developer and Data Wrangler with a decade of development experience in a variety of roles. He can be seen speaking at various conferences and participating in local tech groups and meetups. Upkar went to graduate school in Canada and currently resides in the United States.

Chat your way to a Faster Commute by IBM x TomTom