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.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

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.

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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.

Reading Time: 15 minutes

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.

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October 12, 2020 Read
Quickly Connect an Argon IoT Device to QuestDB

I’m back to Particle.io again. I saw that they were having a 30% off sale on the new Argon and some developer kits, so I had to jump on it, since I haven’t gotten any new Particle hardware in years. So, what follows is a complete guide to connecting one of these kits to QuestDB in order to store the data, and then building a dashboard on top of it with Grafana .

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September 8, 2020 Read
What Happens When you Put Your SQL Database on the Internet

And then we posted it to Hacker News. If you listen to, well, pretty much anyone rational, they will tell you in no uncertain terms that the last thing you ever want to do is put your SQL Database on the internet. And even if you’re crazy enough to do that, you certainly would never go post the address to it on a place like Hacker News. Not unless you were a masochist anyway.

Reading Time: 7 minutes

June 25, 2020 Read
Using Python to Access QuestDB

Using Python to Access QuestDB I’m going to keep this post really short, because almost all the real content is going to be in the tutorial itself. And this isn’t it! What Is This What I’ve built is.n interactive tutorial to get you started with QuestDB using Python. It’s very straightforward, and as long as you have Python 3.x installed, you should be almost ready to go. I say “almost” because you will need to install QuestDB locally in order to complete the tutorial.

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June 12, 2020 Read
A QuestDB Dashboard with Node-Red

This is really a follow-on to my post from last week where I connected an Arduino with a temperature and humidity sensor to QuestDB. It’s one thing to send data to your database, but being able to visualize that data is the next logical step. So let’s dive right in to doing that. QuestDB is rather new, and hence we haven’t completed our Grafana Data Source Plugin yet, so I wanted to make a quick dashboard to show the incoming temperature/humidity data (and you’ll see just how awful the sensor really is).

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June 9, 2020 Read
IoT on QuestDB

As you can well imagine, I’ve been super busy in my hew job at QuestDB so this has taken me longer than I would have liked, but here we are. If you know me at all, you know that one of the first things I always do with new things is, well, connect things to them! So I immediately went to connect an IoT device to QuestDB to see how it went.

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June 5, 2020 Read
It's Time Series All the Way Down

As you are well aware, I’ve been doing IoT for almost 20 years (yeah, not a typo!). And for the last 2.5 years, I’ve been applying that IoT knowledge to Time Series Databases. Also, as you are probably aware, I am no longer at InfluxData, where I’d been doing that. Long story, but I’m not really allowed to talk about it much. One thing I have discovered over the past 2 months, since leaving InfluxData, is that it appears as though I’m the only Developer Relations Professional who actually has expertise in IoT and Time Series Databases.

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May 22, 2020 Read
This stuff is FAST!

I’ve done a lot of projects using InfluxDB over the past few years (well, I did work there after all) so maybe I developed a bit of a bias, or a blind-spot. If you follow me on twitter, then you may have seen me post some quick videos of a project I was working on for visualizing COVID-19 data on a map. It worked, but it was pretty slow. So much so that I had to put a ‘loading’ overlay on it so you knew it was still actually doing something while it was querying the data from the database.

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April 16, 2020 Read
All That Corona Virus Data

Many people have seen the nifty dashboard that John’s Hopkins University put out where you can see the number of COVID-19 cases, etc. throughout the world. It’s really nice and all, but what if you wanted to slice and dice the data yourself? Well, as it turns out, they are also publishing all the underlying data in a GitHub repository! It’s all published as daily CSV (comma separated values) files. Makes it super easy to import into Excel spreadsheets, but spreadsheets are so over.

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March 18, 2020 Read