Automating IoT With Camunda

Some Background When I first started at Camunda back in October, 2020 (what was 2020 anyway?) the very first thing I was asked to do was come up with something I could do for a special Halloween blog post. It being COVID-times, I of course built a Camunda and IoT integration to evaluate costumes and deliver candy. I am sort of well-known for doing weird, pointless IoT projects like this one and this one, and this one.

August 4, 2021 Read
Camunda IoT Project, Part II

This is Part II in the series covering a Proof of Concept (PoC) project I’m working on as part of my job as Principal Developer Advocate at Camunda. I’m not sure how many posts will be in the series, but, well, at least two? If you missed Part I, you might want to catch up on it before continuing. This part of the project was the first hardware build of the project.

June 8, 2021 Read
Kindness

Have you ever had someone say something to you that forced you to entirely re-evaluate everything you’ve thought about yourself? It’s only happened to me a couple of times in my life, but it has been life-altering every time. Background 35 years ago or so I met this person. We’ll call her ‘Nancy’. We moved in the same friend circles. We knew all the same people, shared many friends, etc. We did not get along.

June 3, 2021 Read
Live Streaming Development

I’m working on this massive IoT project this quarter (you can read about it if you’re interested) which is going to be a big hardware build, lots of software, and a bunch of Camunda Platform BPMN. I’ve never really live-streamed before because, you know, who wants to watch me do stupid stuff? Live Stream! My friend Rain was starting to dabble in IoT hardware and software, so I offered to show her what I was doing, and a livestream was born!

April 30, 2021 Read
IoTProject

A Proof of Concept for Camunda Platform BPMN with IoT Abstract Looking to bring Camunda to the attention of the IoT Community by completing a larger IoT/Camunda Proof of Concept Project. This would entail an IoT Build, using Camunda Platform, documentation, a blog post, and promotion to the wider IoT Community. Why pursue this project In many of my initial discussions when joining the company, IoT was mentioned quite frequently as an important, but as-yet untapped market for Camunda Platform.

April 16, 2021 Read
Dealing With Me

Look, we’re all different, and that’s a Good Thing™! We all think, act, and most importantly, communicate, differently. To that end I thought I’d write up this short guide to working with and communicating with me. A Guide to Working with David G. Simmons Pronouns: He/Him Title: Principal Developer Advocate Location: Apex, NC Working Hours & Timezone: Roughly 8:00 am - 8:00 pm US Eastern Time. I don’t work all of those hours, but that’s pretty much when I can be considered available.

April 9, 2021 Read
Handy Tools I Use

This started as a simple post to an internal Slack group. Then I got asked to post it to another channel in that Slack. Then I decided to post it to the DevRel Collective Slack. At which point I was asked to make it a blog post so it didn’t get lost in the scroll-back (DevRel Collective uses a free Slack account, so we can only scroll back 10,000 messages. With 2,000+ members, that happens faster than you think.

April 8, 2021 Read
Ok, So Test-Driven Development is a Thing

I get it, I’m late to the party on this one. I’m old, I’m set in my ways, and I don’t like change. Get over it. Chasing a Bug I was developing a Slack-bot for the DevRelCollective and I had it almost working. Well, to be fair, I had it working for a while, then I broke something. And then I was trying to fix what I broke, and all hell broke loose.

April 6, 2021 Read
How my idea of easy has evolved

It’s easy! Well, that’s easy for you to say! But what’s easy for me may not be easy for you, and it certainly won’t be easy for everyone. I recently did a complete redesign and redeployment of my entire website. It was time. I really wanted to get off of the Wordpress bloat train, so I decided to go with a static site generator. I initially started with Gatsby but, well, I just couldn’t get things working so I ended up with Hugo.

March 12, 2021 Read
Swagger API access with Camunda Platform

Have you ever fired up the Camunda Platform Docker instance and wished you could do live-calls to the API via a swagger server? We have! And like most things we wish we could do, we go out and make it happen. Coming Soon To be clear, this integration is coming to the official Camunda Platform Docker container with release 7.15. It’s just not ready yet. So this is really more of an interim solution rather than the be-all and end-all solution, but it works, and it makes sending API calls to a live instance of Camunda Platform a lot easier.

March 10, 2021 Read
Letters to Santa – Automating Joy to the World, At Scale

It’s that time of year again. The time when the world’s largest order fulfillment operation experiences its heaviest load. No, not Amazon - we’re talking about Santa Claus, Inc. - the largest logistics company in the world, with a 24-hour global delivery window at peak load. This year is different, however. Earlier this year, Saint Nick clicked on an ad on his Facebook feed, one promising a digital nomad lifestyle through automating his business.

December 18, 2020 Read
What in the job hopping hell?

You what? I changed jobs. Again. Yes. I did. But there’s a good reason for it. It wasn’t that long ago that I posted about leaving InfluxData and joining QuestDB as their Head of Developer Relations. In fact, it was only 6 months ago. And yet, here I am, once again, posting about a job change. This is, you may notice, not characteristic of me. I was at Sun for 15 years, then Riverbed for 2.

October 12, 2020 Read