Moving On

I know it may seem like this happens all the time, but I’ve left Camunda and started a new position. (I’ll get to where in a minute.) Though it may seem from this, and this that I change jobs all the time, that’s not entirely true. Earlier in my career, things were very different. I worked at Sun Microsystems (a moment of silence, as always) for 15 years and, had Oracle not bought them, I’d likely still be there.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

August 24, 2022 Read
Using TLS to POST from ESP-32 to a Cloudflare service

Arduino HTTPClient Failure I don’t know if anyone else has ever tried this, but I just spent the better part of a week trying to debug this little problem, so I thought maybe I’d save someone some time. I was trying to use WiFiClientSecure along with HTTPClient to POST to an authentication server that is fronted by cloudflare. No matter what I did, I got error messages. I was sending a JSON payload, and it kept telling me that the parameters weren’t in the JSON.

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April 8, 2022 Read
Moving to Camunda Cloud

Some background I’ve written a bit about using Camunda to do all sorts of things from automating IoT processes to helping with the management of a Slack community. Ok, so I haven’t written about all of those things, but I’ve certainly done them. In all of those projects I’ve used Camunda Platform 7 to deploy and run my processes, but most of the actual work was done by external tasks which I wrote in Golang.

Reading Time: 11 minutes

March 24, 2022 Read
An Automated IoT Greenhouse with Camunda

Note: Originally published on DZone so don’t forget to give it some ❤️ over there! Running this project Clone the repository cd into the project directory: Deploy the co2.bpmn process definition to your Camunda server cd into the task-worker directory: run go mod tidy to update the task-worker module adjust all constant values in the task-handler.go file run go run task-handler.go cd into the arduino-code directory open the Greenhouse.

Reading Time: 21 minutes

March 15, 2022 Read
A Time Translation Library for Golang

I can safely say that I’ve never done this before, but it’s been really fun to do (and surprisingly quick, but I’ll get to that.) What’s ‘this’? I wrote a Go module. Wait, what? Yep, I wrote a complete Go module that does nearly instantaneous translations for aspects of time – like months, days of the week, etc. Doesn’t Go provide internationalization? The short answer: No. The slightly longer answer: No, it doesn’t.

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September 29, 2021 Read
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.

Reading Time: 15 minutes

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.

Reading Time: 14 minutes

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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

Reading Time: 11 minutes

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.

Reading Time: 9 minutes

April 8, 2021 Read