Buckle up, Buttercup! I am dg

David G. Simmons

I'm The Head of Developer Relations. at Zymbit

I am an Internet of Things (IoT) pioneer who has been working in the field for over 20 years.

I have been doing Developer Relations for even longer.

Currently the Head of Developer Relations at Zymbit, I have also served as the Head of Developer Relations at Otterize and QuestDB. I did a short stint as Head of Developer Advocacy at StarTree.

Previously, I was Principal Developer Advocate at Camunda, and the Senior Developer Advocate at Influx Data.

If you’re wondering how Time Series Databases are related to IoT, read about Why an IoT expert does Time Series Data.

DevRel
Empathy
Public Speaking
Team Work & Collaboration
Problem Solving
Writing
Community Building
Technical Skills

Skills

Experience

1
Zymbit

May 2024 - Present

Santa Barbara, CA (remote)

High security IoT Edge devices.

Head of Developer Relations

May 2024 - Present

Responsibilities:
  • Leading Developer Relations efforts at this IoT startup
  • Content creation including blog posts, tutorials and videos and tutorials.
  • Presentations at international IoT conferences and meetups
  • Support and provide resources to the greater DevRel Community
  • Define, execute and measure the overall Developer Relations strategy
Otterize

June 2023 - December 2023

Tel Aviv, Israel (remote)

Simplifying Kubernetes security and compliance.

Head of Developer Relations

June 2023 - December 2023

Responsibilities:
  • Leading Developer Relations efforts at this startup
  • Content creation including blog posts, tutorials and videos
  • Doubled the size of the Otterize Community
  • Lead the documentation efforts company-wide
  • Support and provide resources to the greater DevRel Community
2
3
StarTree

August 2022 - June 2023

Mountain View, CA (remote)

A Real-Time Analytics company providing Apache Pinot as a service for companies needing high-volume, real-time, customer-facing analytics.

Head of Developer Advocacy

August 2022 - June 2023

Responsibilities:
  • Leading Developer Advocacy team
  • Standard DevRel tasks of Blog posts, community interactions and support, and support of internal stakeholders
  • Mentoring of jr. DevRels both inside the company and in the DevRel Community as a whole
  • Support and provide resources to the greater DevRel Community
Camunda, Inc.

October 2020 - July 2022

Berlin, Germany (remote)

A process automation platform that enables tens of thousands of developers to design, automate and improve processes and provide better customer experiences, deliver projects faster and increase business agility.

Principal Developer Advocate (DR4)

October 2020 - July 2022

Responsibilities:
  • Leading the introduction of Camunda to the IoT Community
  • Standard DevRel tasks of Blog posts, community interactions and support, contributions to the Camunda Platform Open Source codebase, and support of internal stakeholders
  • Mentoring of jr. DevRels both inside the company and in the DevRel Community as a whole
  • Support and provide resources to the greater DevRel Community
4
5
QuestDB

May 2020 - October 2020

London, UK (remote)

Time Series Database startup focused on extreme performance with a SQL-based, dependency-free database.

Head of Developer Relations

May 2020 - October 2020

Responsibilities:
  • Community development and management of the open source developer Community
  • Tooling for community and developer happiness metrics and management
  • Regular technical contributions to the company blog
  • Define and execute the overall Developer Relations strategy.
  • Regular international public speaking engagements at Meetups, conferences and company events. See my Notist for more.
InfluxData

August 2017 - April 2020

San Francisco, CA USA (remote)

Time Series database company responsible for the Open Source InfluxDB database and Telegraf data ingestion agent

Senior Developer Advocate

August 2017 - April 2020

Responsibilities:
  • Technology leadership on IoT throughout the company in product development and direction
  • Development of complex demos highlighting InfluxData technology for IoT
  • Recruiting and training of other developer relations staff
  • Contributions to company’s open source products through GitHub Pull Requests
  • Lead efforts for collaboration and inclusion in external Open Source initiatives like EclipseIoT, etc.
  • Regular technical contributions to the company blog (https://influxdata.com/blog)
  • Regular international public speaking engagements at Meetups, conferences and company events. See my Notist for more
6
7
Dragonfly IoT

November 2015 - Present

Holly Springs, NC USA

Dragonfly IoT is an IoT consultancy providing hardware and software development resources.

Founder/Chief Technology Officer

November 2015 - Present

Responsibilities:
  • I founded Dragonfly IoT to provide technical consulting and contract development services to companies in IoT based on my extensive experience in the field
  • Scoped, proposed and built IoT demo applications including hardware acquisition, provisioning and programming, development of middleware and gateway devices and presentation-layer data analysis
  • Contributed to open-source IoT projects like Apache MyNewt
  • Authored white papers, blog posts and user documentation for demos, projects and open-source software efforts
PsiKick (now Everactive)

February 2015 - October 2015

Charlottesville, VA USA (remote)

Develops ultra low-power chips and SoCs for the IoT.

Chief Technical Evangelist

February 2015 - October 2015

Responsibilities:
  • Led the definition and development of a user and developer platform for a new IoT system-on-chip being developed including defining developer APIs and points of engagement with customers
  • Defined developer platform architecture for engaging developers on new IoT SoC
  • Tested experimental IoT hardware and developed Demos to showcase capabilities in C, Python and Swift
  • Built custom iOS Bluetooth applications for demos and custom (C-based) developer interface for in-house developed hardware
  • Ported Linux/Windows drivers to Mac OS X
  • Brought in both Fortune 50 and emerging-company partners and customers through direct industry contacts and evangelism efforts
  • Engaged new hardware development partner to lower board-level development costs by over 50%
8
9
Riverbed Technology

October 2012 - February 2015

San Francisco, CA USA (remote)

Riverbed provides hardware and services to maximize network performance for remote office and other WAN-based needs.

Technical Evangelist

October 2012 - February 2015

Responsibilities:
  • Responsible for the development and delivery of user groups, technical sessions and webinars to enable the field sales organization to maximize sales opportunities
  • Worldwide technical evangelism for the Entire Riverbed platform of products including WAN Optimization, Storage Optimization, Network and Application Performance Management, and Cloud Storage solutions including hundreds of user-group presentations to thousands of customers
  • Helped close over $90M in sales per year
  • Authored white papers, blog posts and user documentation for demos, projects and open-source software efforts
  • Developed and delivered demos for video, web, and major on-stage product launches
  • Organized and developed the technical session content for the Riverbed FORCE user conference including 60 Technical Sessions, 20 Hands on Labs, and continuous Certification Testing for over 1,000 attendees
  • Developed and delivered webinars to over 2,000 participants annually
Sun Microsystems Labs (now Oracle Labs)

July 2003 - April 2012

Menlo Park, CA USA (remote)

Industry leader in advanced research and development of such technologies as Java.

Staff Engineer

July 2003 - April 2012

Responsibilities:
  • Contributed to the development and overall success of the Sun SPOT IoT Developer Platform project
  • Led the development of the on-line developer community
  • Research and development for embedded wireless sensor network platform
  • Developed and grew the user and developer community from zero to over 3,000 participants in 3 years
  • Developed the installation and maintenance software for entire Sun SPOT Platform including hardware and SDK deployment and upgrades
  • Developed and delivered Technical Hands On Labs at Java One — the premier Java developer conference — for 3 consecutive years
  • Developed the Demonstration Application Suite for Sun SPOT Platform
  • Maintained a regular high-traffic technical blog (top 50 blogs on blogs.sun.com)
10

Education

University of New Mexico
1992-1995
MS Computer Science (incomplete)
Columbia University in the City of New York
1985 - 1988
B.A. Technical Writing
University of California, Santa Barbara
1982 - 1985
B.S. Biological Sciences (incomplete, transferred)
Extracurricular Activities:
  • Undergraduate Teaching Assistant.
  • Dean’s Honors (1983 - 1985).

Projects

QR Builder
QR Builder
Owner, Designer, Developer, Chief Dog Walker Decmber 2023 - Present

QR Builder is a simple, modern interface to building custom QR Codes for you and your brand. Customize nearly every aspect of your QR Codes to reflect your personality or brand, all while retaining complete control over how you track QR Code usage.

professional marketing
Star
DevRelCollective
DevRelCollective
Moderator March 2019 - Present

The DevRel Collective. An industry professional group of about 2,000 DevRel professionals.

professional devrel
Star
Camunda Halloween
Camunda Halloween
Developer October, 2020

A fun IoT-based Halloween (or dog) treat dispenser using IoT cameras, BPMN, and MQTT.

professional iot
Star
Swift Library for InfluxDB
Swift Library for InfluxDB
Owner Jul 2019 - Present

A Swift library for writing Data to InfluxDB. Now picked up as an official library for InfluxDB.

professional iot
Star
IoT Poop Detector
IoT Poop Detector
Nothing Oct 2019 - Dec 2019

I said I do dumb IoT Projects, and this is one of the dumbest. A bathroom stench-detector that alerts with a light-up poop-emoji

hobby iot fun
Details
BME 280 Go Driver
BME 280 Go Driver
Owner Jun 2019 - Present

A driver for the Bosch BME 280 Temperature, humidity and pressure sensor written entirely in Go.

hobby iot professional
Star

Recent Posts

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Yet Another Job

Wait, what?!? I know, I know, it seems like I’ve been changing jobs a lot lately. So much so that I haven’t even written posts about some of them. Note: This has always been one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons from way back in the day when I lived in NYC. In the 1980s, this was a real phenomenon on the Upper West Side. It’s been a very difficult time for the industry, for DevRel in particular, and for me individually.

Wednesday, October 16, 2024 Read
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How to avoid bricking your raspberry pi during updates

Having an update brick (render inoperable) your device is a real risk, and even the largest of companies have been known to have it happen. This has just happened to Apple (Apple pauses iPadOS 18 rollout for M4 iPad Pro after bricking complaints) and I think we’re all well aware of the Crowdstrike incident by now. It’s such an issue that, given the recent disasters with update rollouts (which I wrote about briefly here) it seemed like a good topic to dive into.

Wednesday, October 16, 2024 Read
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Devrel Is a Party (no it's not)

I’ve been interviewing a lot lately (and no, I don’t want to talk about it). I’m asked almost all the time “How do you define Developer Relations?” and this post is the long-form answer to that question. I’m writing it because almost every interviewer I’ve given this to has said some form of “that’s a really good analogy! You should write that up as a blog post.” So here we are.

Wednesday, February 7, 2024 Read