About the Archives

Archival posts Over time I have written a lot of content for a variety of employers, publishers, etc. and, while those folks may (or may not) still have that content available I wanted to make sure that I preserved it here for myself. I have a lot of content that I am proud of and I want to make sure that I can find it again. 2019 2018 Monitoring Wireless Interfaces 2017 ThingMonk 2017 Zero to Awesome with InfluxDB Use InfluxDB to Measure Discourse Architechting InfluxDB for Data Downsampling

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November 14, 2022 Read
Measuring and Monitoring Community Engagement on Discourse with InfluxDB

This post was originally published on InfluxData’s Blog Monitoring Discourse We here at InfluxData use Discourse for our Community (you’re a member of our Community, right? No? Well, go sign up!!) Part of my job here at InfluxData is to keep my eye on the community, answer questions, and work to grow the community. And part of that, of course, is metrics. It always comes down to what you can measure, doesn’t it?

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November 3, 2022 Read
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.

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August 24, 2022 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
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.

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April 9, 2021 Read
Honey I Instrumented the Kids

This is my first time using ChatGPT to do translations. Please let me know if they are better (or worse) than the Google Translate versions in other posts This post was originally posted on the InfluxData Blog. Parenting is hard. It’s even harder when your kids are sick. But kids are germ factories, and no matter what you do, they get sick. And then you have to touch them and get the germs on you.

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March 27, 2018 Read
Monitoring Your Wireless Interfaces

This post was originally posted on the InfluxData Blog. If you’ve followed my last few posts, you’ll see that I’ve been waist-deep in routers and wireless stuff. I’m building a larger, more complicated ‘reference architecture’ for IoT monitoring with InfluxDB, and to do that, I’m using all sorts of different boxes. I’m re-using my Pine-64 box (see here) and I wanted to be able to monitor the stats of the Wireless interface.

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January 16, 2018 Read
Monitoring OpenWRT with Telegraf

This post was originally published on InfluxData’s blog. What’s the most popular open source router software in the world? OpenWRT, of course! It’s the go-to firmware replacement for a huge number of routers both for home and business use. So of course, you need to monitor it! Now routers are, strictly speaking, an IoT device, but hey, it is a (relatively) small, embedded device that is ubiquitous, and really deserves some attention.

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December 18, 2017 Read
Architecting IoT Gateway Devices for Data Downsampling

There are all sorts of ways to architect your IoT Data Deployment, and what’s right for one enterprise will not necessarily be right for another. Depending on the size and complexity of your IoT project , there can be, of course, a lot of components. One of the more universal architectures is to deploy sensor hubs or IoT gateway devices to collect data from a number of sensor nodes and then forward that data on to an upstream data collection system for the enterprise.

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December 14, 2017 Read
Time for a Twitter Transition

I’ve been on Twitter for a long time. A really long time. Longer than my actual twitter profile would indicate. (I think I first joined in late 2006.) At one point, I had over 5,000 followers, but, well, basically twitter’s security and policing was so atrocious that, for reasons of personal safety, I quit twitter and deleted my account. I was gone for about 2 years. I came back and started fresh in 2012.

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October 25, 2017 Read
Go From Zero to Awesome in 5 Minutes or Less

This post was originally published on InfluxData’s blog on 2017-10-20. We here at InfluxData have a thing about Time to Awesome™. So much so that we Trademarked it. No, seriously, we did. And we mean it. So let’s go from Zero to Awesome! We are singularly focused on reducing the Time to Awesome, we truly care about helping developers and businesses get to results faster with less complexity and less code.

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October 20, 2017 Read
ThingMonk 2017

Note: This is a post from my archives. I wrote it in 2017, and it was posted on the InfluxData Blog. Back in September 2017, I attended the ThingMonk Conference in London. Here is a brief overview of what I learned and some of the insight I gleaned from the conference. The ThingMonk 2017 videos are starting to drop if you want to get the full scoop. Background The annual1 ThingMonk IoT conference was held in Shoreditch, London from September 11 – 13, 2017 with InfluxData sponsoring the video recordings.

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October 20, 2017 Read