Hi, I am dg

David G. Simmons

Head of Developer Relations at Otterize

I am an Internet of Things (IoT) pioneer who has been working in the field for over 20 years. I am now the Head of Developer Relations at Otterize. I did a short stint as Head of Developer Advocacy at StarTree. Previously, I was Principle Developer Advocate at Camunda, Head of Developer Relations at QuestDB and the Senior Developer Advocate at Influx Data. That’s 2 Time Series databases in a row. If you’re wondering how that’s related to IoT, read about Why an IoT does Time Series Data.

DevRel
Empathetic
Presentations
Team Work
Fast Learner
Problem Solver

Skills

Experience

1
Head of Developer Relations
Otterize

June 2023 - Present, Tel Aviv, Israel (remote)

Providing security and ease of use for Kubernetes, AWS, GKE, and more.

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

Head of Developer Advocacy
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.

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
2

3
Principal Developer Advocate (DR4)
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.

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

Head of Developer Relations
QuestDB

May 2020 - October 2020, London, UK (remote)

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

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.
4

5
Senior Developer Advocate
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

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

Founder/Chief Technology Officer
Dragonfly IoT

November 2015 - Present, Holly Springs, NC USA

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

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.
6

7
Chief Technical Evangelist
PsiKick (now Everactive)

February 2015 - October 2015, Charlottesville, VA USA (remote)

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

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%.

Technical Evangelist
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.

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.
8

9
Staff Engineer
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.

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).

Education

MS Computer Science (incomplete)
B.A. Technical Writing
B.S. Biological Sciences (incomplete)
Extracurricular Activities
  • Undergraduate Teaching Assistant.
  • Dean's Honors (1983 - 1985).

Projects

DevRelCollective
DevRelCollective
Moderator March 2019 - Present

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

Star
Camunda Halloween
Camunda Halloween
Developer October, 2020

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

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.

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

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.

Star

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