Skip to content

Author: Patrick Steinert

Published 07.01.18

fifty2:one

As many people have, I have picked some New Years resolutions. As I’m interested in photography but didn’t have shot much in the past two years, I want to do more. I want to do some projects and one of them is a 52-week project. If you’re not familiar with it, it means that I shoot and publish a picture every week for a year. This is just to stick with photography, get some creative mojo and practice the craft. So don’t expect awesome fine-art photos every week.

This is my first photo. The whole week here was mostly overcast, rainy and some winter storms (without snow). One day in the evening on a walk, the sun came out to say goodbye for the day.

View in full resolution on flickr

Continue readingfifty2:one
Leave a Comment
Published 05.01.18

Do’s And Don’ts For Building A Developer Community

Support your developer community. Developers want to create successful stuff instead of try and error.
Support your developer community. Developers want to create successful stuff instead of try and error.

The great thing about the software tools today is, that most of them provide an API for developers. People can enhance, connect or create new products with the API. But how can you support developers and build a developer community or developer ecosystem? This Do’s and Dont’s list will help you to navigate through the unlimited possibilities of activities.

Continue readingDo’s And Don’ts For Building A Developer Community
Leave a Comment
Published 03.01.18

6 Technology Trends for 2018

Every year, the innovation cycle gets shorter and shorter. Who know’s what technologies will emerge in 2018. But some big technology trends have recognizable growing attention. I predict that the following selected 6 technology trends will become sustainable in 2018.

Autonomous drones

Drones are still a cutting-edge technology, apart from multi-copters for filming purposes. Fully autonomous drones can be observed in closed areas, like logistic centers. Some prove of concepts already have been done in public for pizza delivery, postal service, or parcel delivery. In 2018, artificial intelligence and robotics will mature to commercial readiness.

Edge Computing

Multi-Access Edge Computing (or Mobile Edge Computing; MEC) will come commercially available in carrier networks. Even before the 5G standard will be finished, carriers will implement cloud computing capabilities in their networks. The question is, do they have the customer in mind and deploy a common system or do they create isolated solutions? Anyway, application builders can improve their customer experience with low latency or compute offloading solutions.

Continue reading6 Technology Trends for 2018
Leave a Comment
Published 01.01.18

Retrospective 12/2017 & Year Review 2017

Retrospective 2017

Happy New Year 2018! I hope everybody had a vibrant start to the new year. Like the end of last year, I updated my goals and set up new goals for 2018 in the last days. As usual, the main problem is the lack of time. Here and there are some possible obstacles in sight, but to achieve all I want to do I need more time. You know? At least with my (new) job with the Edge Computing, I can enjoy technology & programming again. I hope you will stay with me the next year. I plan some more blog posts about the Edge stuff. But, I won’t promise anything, because, you know… procrastinating and so on. But let me recap:

What have I done in December

  • finalized projects for CoT – there are some nice updates in the pipe for early 2018
  • completed my overall 2017 cycling goal
  • started my first experiments on the DT edge computing platform – I’m
  • submitted a proposal for buildingIoT 2018
  • preparations for MWC 2018
  • Christmas shopping ordering

Thought

  • maybe I should take more pictures again
  • it needs a clear definition of Fog and Edge Computing
  • these books don’t write themselves
  • this could be a sustainable business…

Read

 

Recap of 2017

Let me start off by thanking everybody who was with me in 2017 and for all your support!

  • Business: in 2017, there were more up’s and down’s than usual. But since Cloud of Things was migrated to our superior hosting partner, we had an uptime of 100%. Since then we had a dry period. Some maintenance and organizational changes, but no surprises. The numbers were sophisticating. In the second half, there was a hard time. Setting up new initiatives but still, do the right things.
  • Private goals: there are some checked and a few missed goals. Checked? Definitely sports
veloviewer-infographic
Veloviewer Infographic of my activities in 2017

Let’s start strong in 2018 and thank you for being here!

Continue readingRetrospective 12/2017 & Year Review 2017
1 Comment
Published 12.12.17

IoT is dead, long live Edge Computing

In the last 3.5 years, I was responsible for the service development of the Cloud of Things, the IoT platform of Deutsche Telekom. It’s been an incredible adventure, but after almost four years, it’s time for me to move on. Developing a product for the Internet of Things was a fantastic adventure. Learning the various different customer problems and build a full-service stack to solve them with ease, fast and secure. We started from a small base and have grown up to a major pillar in the DT IoT strategy. But, inside Deutsche Telekom, the topic went “big”, too big. I selected my next adventure: low latency edge computing. The Low Latency Computing platform is built to reduce the latency between the computing device and the cloud. The Low Latency Computing platform enables customer solutions like suitable Car-to-X communication. It helps to smooth the end-customer experience with low latency, e.g.…

Continue readingIoT is dead, long live Edge Computing
1 Comment
Published 07.12.17

Retrospective 11/17

Retropective-11-17 - Chris Lawton

A lot happened in the past months. There was a big change in the company regarding IoT. A re-organization, new goals, a broader approach to the market. With little free time, I couldn’t manage to write about the details, I just tweeted about short stuff. But now, by the end of the year, I find time to write some updates.

What have I done:

  • managed, managed and managed – less real work
  • we released version 1.0 of the Cloud of Things developer SDK
  • I voted in the general election
  • changed my job – more on this in another post
  • starting development of some features on Cloud of Things and
  • start writing a book

Thought:

  • about platform strategy, technology development
  • much about my job and what I want to do
  • (1 try) change it, (2) leave it, love it
  • how to live more healthy and mindful
  • write a book!

Read:

Continue readingRetrospective 11/17
1 Comment
Published 29.11.17

Analyze Strava Training By Zones With Python

Example diagram - title image
Example diagram – title image

Effective training is key to build a strong foundation for competition. That’s why I am using the Strava API with Python to analyze Strava training activities. I started my winter training recently and wanted to make sure I’m training effectively. Especially, I want to see if I stay in the right zones during the training. I have set up my Forerunner alarms appropriate, but I train outdoor, so it goes up and down during the run and I can’t control everything during the ride. Human. Not robot.

I started with the stravalib library, for reading the data from the API. As usual in data science, I need to transform and prepare the data for visualization. I end up storing the generated plots and build a quick & dirty HTML-file to display the stuff. I will now guide you through the example. I will explain the important steps. You can find the complete code on https://github.com/marquies/strava-viz.

Continue readingAnalyze Strava Training By Zones With Python
Leave a Comment
Published 11.04.17

Retrospective Q1/2017

What have I done:

  • The first quarter was much about migration from OpenShift PaaS to IaaS operating platform. We migrated all existing staging and production environments, with all customer data. A simple lesson learned: doing something over and over again trains you and you can perform much better if it counts.
  • In March Cloud of Things Starter Kit was launched.
  • Offsite, Offsite, Offsite. The growing demand of leaving the office building to getting to know each other, re-organize work and getting things done looks like an anti-pattern of work culture.
  • Late start of training for the upcoming MTB season.
  • Started programming an iOS App to refresh my developer skills.
  • Thought about some blog posts, but deleted them again. Some things should be untold.

Thought:

  • SMART defined goals are key.
  • Visualize your work.
  • Stop arguing about tools, start using one of them!
  • If you have more meetings than working hours a day, something is wrong.
  • Do you even have a target picture, bro?

Read:

Continue readingRetrospective Q1/2017
Leave a Comment
Published 11.02.17

Retrospective January 2017

Slogan of the month: Stop starting and start finishing.

(Again)
What have I done:

  • Re-created the CoT project portfolio, now in a digital version (experimenting with Excel). It is good for sharing in our digital and distributed working environment, but a bit harder to update.
  • I attended the Bonn Agile Meetup January: “IoT und Bastelprojekte” and talked about my AirQuality Lab project 
  • I attended a lot of Kick-Off-events (unit, department, CoT-team, Service Development team). Some were useful, some had good food.
  • I worked on our first goals for 2017. First results in February 2017.
  • I completed a course on my Coursera data science specialization course (Reproducible research)
  • Watched the NFL playoffs

Read:

Continue readingRetrospective January 2017
Leave a Comment
Published 13.01.17

The AirQuality Lab: How To Work With IoT Sensors

IoT Sensor: The AirQuality Lab

 

Want to learn about the Internet of Things and how to work with a sensor? I did too! I’ve been experimenting with the “Internet of Things” (IoT) since 2014 and have learned about the challenges with my sensor project: the AirQuality Lab. In the beginning, I just wanted to create something and work with the components. The scope of my side project was to read values from a sensor, transfer it to a thing-backend and then learning from the data. This post starts with the basic setup of the Thing and the following posts will cover further points.

After finishing a project in late 2014, I played around to learn a bit more about the Internet of Things (IoT) stuff for my next project. So, it was (and is) proposed, that “everything is connected in 2020” and I had to think about a product, product strategy and technical implementation in this area. Our thoughts about a domain model for IoT at this time was, to reduce everything to a source and a drain. Well, as hardware is cheap (but this is not all) I bought a Raspberry PI, a bunch of sensors and a small LCD display. Inspired by the CubeSensors, I wanted to measure air quality with the sensors and work with the derived data. This should help to understand how things process data, how to transfer it, how to analyze and derive information from it. I started the AirQuality Lab.

Continue readingThe AirQuality Lab: How To Work With IoT Sensors
Leave a Comment