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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.

Published 01.01.17

Retrospective December 2016

Slogan of the month: The intellectual capital of your business has two legs and walks home every day.

What have I done:

  • Had nice workshops at Fraunhofer Institute for Big Data Analytics
  • Successfully finished hard work on a internal data center migration with the Cloud of Things team
  • Planted the seeds for the hosting quality improvements
  • Worked on the performance of my blog. Improved site performance by 40%. PHP upgrade to v7 was the most gain. Performance could be better but for my kind of hosting it’s very good.
  • Designed strategy, corner milestones and goals for 2017
  • Prepared my talk for Bonn Agile Meetup January: IoT und Bastelprojekte (more on this later in this blog)
  • Enjoyed Christmas and New Year’s Eve vacation

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Published 31.12.16

Books I have read in 2016

As a recap of 2016, I have created a list of the 2016 books I have bought and read. At least a serious bit. Maybe you are also interested in these books. Efficient Learning Machines: Theories, Concepts, and Applications for Engineers and System Designers Mariette Awad, Rahul Khanna This book is more a reference of Machine Learning and I use it this way. The book contains much mathematical stuff to explain the algorithms. So if you like Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery Sriram Narayan I choose this book as a resource for organizing my teams and make the organization more agile. While carefully selecting the methods to apply for me, I liked one the most: Alignment Maps. This concept helped my team to understand which business goals we have and why they have to do everything. A great way to show the team why their…

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Published 29.12.16

Goal Setting & Time Management

If you are like me preparing the new year between the holidays, maybe these resources help you like me.

Brian Tracy Goal Setting Guide

Brian Tracy has written down a good guide for goal setting. He hasn’t added anything which is not common sense, if you have already read the basics of this topic. You can get his article for 0$ here, you just need to subscribe to the newsletter. Of course you can use trash-mail.com or so, but he is an excellent source for information about personal development and productivity. I just learned he has an app for this process too, but I haven’t tried yet.

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Published 24.12.16

IoT hardware is cheap, but other things are difficult

Internet of Things - Raspberry PiIn the early days of the Internet of Things hype, the industry stated that computing power and accessories are cheap and ubiquitous. Read: available and ready to use. The good part of this statement is, that it is true. Partly. RaspberryPi, Arduino, Seed Studio Groove, Adafruit Feather and so on are cheap and versatile computing devices, available on many online retailers. Several toolkits and online resources help the hackers and makers to prototype and develop products. Also many online platforms are ready for the users to connect and manage the things.

Nonetheless is the Internet of Things not as ready as the industry states. You can prototype fast, but if you would like to adapt the Internet of Things for your business. If you compare the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies from 2015 and 2016 you may see, that the Internet of Things was dropped. While not sure if intentionally or not, it can’t be found on the plateau of productivity. I would place it in the trough of disillusion. For example, here are some topics, the industry is struggling with.

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Published 07.12.16

Risk Assessment: How I Do It And How You Can Use It Too

Risk: Slip up danger
Risk: Slip up danger

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?
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Published 04.12.16

Retrospective November 2016

img_2743Slogan of the month: What you see is not always what you get

What have I done:

  • Worked on the Cloud of Things Java Rest SDK
  • Been happy to be ranked as a leader in the magic quadrant in Gartner Report of “Managed M2M Services“
  • Shook my head about the president election in the USA.
  • Proceed in my study of Data Science
  • Worked on the strategy & goals for 2017’s Cloud of Things
  • Worked on NB-IoT integration

Read:

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Published 24.11.16

Note keeping – a hybrid approach

Notes - by INPIVIC Family - CC Attribution 2.0 Generic
Notes – by INPIVIC Family – CC Attribution 2.0 Generic

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.

Pro digital note keeping

  • Ubiquitous access with any device at any time
  • Is “never” full
  • Is searchable

Pro analog note keeping

  • Unlimited styles of notes: drawings, decoration
  • Simple: Pen & Paper and here you go

So what to do?

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Published 07.03.16

Retrospective February 2016

Retrospective
Retrospective

Favorite slogan: So we are doomed!

What have I done:

  • Worked hard on launching new Cloud of Things Features: New Cockpit App is out!
  • Wonder how someone can setup a MongoDB Docker Cluster without persistence!?
  • Coded on some Cloud of Things API and Client stuff Had a new record on contributing code to Github: Longest streak 7 days
    January 30 – February 5.
  • Updating servers for glibc vulnerability.
  • Start planning for big CoT team ramp-up. Scale from one to four teams in one month. Big experiment.
  • Had a week of vacation. Practiced not to work. Successful.
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Published 02.02.16

Retrospective January 2016

Favorite slogan: You want to get things done, not building an inventory of unfinished work!

What have I done:

  • Kicked of the first quarter 2016 with hard deadlines for Cloud of Things (watch out for CeBIT)
  • Had some weekend & night shifts because of service outages of Cloud of Things. Turned out that a Gelf4J appender for Graylog caused the issues.
  • Started to play with JavaFX and build a Cloud of Things Genius Client for testing purposes on CoT. (Thanks code.makery for this helpful JavaFX tutorial)
  • Did a talk on our Deutsche Telekom M2M Day 2016
  • I have a new record on contributing to Github

Read:

 

PS: A new try to give a regular update on this blog. Last year I tried a weekly recap, didn’t worked out. But I’m pretty sure that this will work ;-)

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Published 07.01.16

Internet of Things – my thoughts revisted

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.

Global Internet of Things Day Vienna, by Horst JENS, (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Global Internet of Things Day Vienna, by Horst JENS (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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.

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