... writes about the Internet of Things, Agile Software Development and Photography
Category: Technology
In this category I file blog posts about technology. If it is about the Internet of Things, agile development, a framework, a method, a pattern, or everything els technology relevant, I will post it here.
One day, my friend Christoph Görn told me something about risk estimation. I think he learned it at IBM or so. It is a keep it simple stupid technique for tech projects and you get a quick result. I used it in my recent years as a technical program manager to judge my projects and it never failed.
tl;dr: There are three simple criteria to assess the risk of a project in a quick & easy way.
How does it work? There are three main criteria:
Does it involve technology which is new to you?
Does the project involve a partner/supplier/team you have no experience with?
Does the project has a volume which is relatively high for you?
“Because lot of the engineers and researchers in and around “IoT”, me included, are getting quite tired of these sorts of fluff “vision” and “projecting competence” pieces that don’t contribute anything new to the conversation” → Storm the Beaches! Liberate IoT Data!?
A productivity topic I always work on, is note keeping. One of the basic questions is ubiquitous: analog or digital notes? While I like Evernote a lot (I’m using it since years), I also like taking notes in a classic notebook. Inspired by Andy Brands article I decided to use the Quo Vadis Notebooks. But I also use a Moleskine 18 month calendar to track time planned things.
I had written my first article about my thoughts on the internet of things about three months ago. I gained some more insights and experiences since then, also, for the beginning of 2016 I feel the time has come for an update.
In my last post I wrote about the maturity of IoT solutions. I think the market is still in the same position. There are many innovators, doing their first steps by digitalizing things and connect them with the Internet (by the end of 2016, do we still talk about the Internet of Things? Or just the Internet?). But the main issue is still the variety of technologies, the problems of physical implementations in retrofit, different types of use cases. Okay, I would make an exception for the Smart Home industry. These points are huge barriers for the implementers in terms of time, budget and quality (ROI).But all the machine manufactures, the producers of all the physical things which doesn’t need a power supply? The big tech companies (e.g. Amazon and Microsoft) are developing tools and services for the market, but they don’t address a major problem: the mass-market digitalization and connection of things.
I’m testing RedHats new version of their PaaS product OpenShift 3.0. I would like to find out, what capabilities are there for using different protocols than http and http+tls, because it was a missing feature in the 2.0 version. OpenShift 3.0 has the concept of routers to direct incoming traffic to the endpoints. Sad but true fact is, there are just two implementations of routers available (HA Proxy andF5 BIG-IP®) and they just support the protocols HTTP, HTTPS (with SNI), WebSockets and TLS with SNI. Nevertheless, there are some fancy HA Proxy configs for other protocols and I want to play with them. First of all I needed to get a custom HA Proxy running. Here is how:
While 2015 is nearly gone, many people use the time to recap the year. So did I. It was a very interesting year and there a many different parts to look at:
Experiences
Some photos from different journeys and day trips.
This week I read an article on Wired about the data flow in the Internet of Things. It is essentially about how things are connected and where the data flows through, and provides a good description of the basics of Internet of Things. But connecting machines, devices and other things, and transferring data from one site to the other is just the necessary stuff. Don’t get me wrong – it is pretty complex, perhaps even the most complex part of it. The heterogeneous physical interfaces, protocols, connectivity options and use cases result in maximum diversity on this site. However, with a good range of IoT software systems we can solve any problem. By the way, it is wise to choose an independent IoT system regarding devices and technology. This will assure your investment for the future. Sad but true – the amount of work for integration still does not fit all business…
It was very quite here since a while. This was manly caused by the heavy workload I had, to bring up our service Deutsche Telekom M2M Device Cloud (or Cloud der Dinge for German market). It is the starting point of Deutsche Telekom IoT solutions, a device management and IoT app-enabling service. Find more information about it on our website – which btw needs an overhaul, but you get the main point: Device Cloud. For German readers also interesting about the Telekom Industry 4.0 package. Of course, talking about the topic IoT, we mix up different buzz words, following the newest marketing wagon. M2M, Internet of Things, maybe Industry 4.0 is a little bit special because it covers more than IT. But roughly it becomes all the Internet again, as you follow this O’Reilly discussion. This is also my understanding. So, this week we started operation of our service. Not…