“Projects and Samples” can best be viewed for now as an occasional series arising from the build-out of the Progressive Gauge site. Enjoy!
User voices – Key to trustworthy content
On IoT database design – Frederik Van Leeckwyck, the business development manager at Factry.IO told us that data is different in Industrial IoT. Van Leeckwyck said Maarkedal, Belgium-based Factry.IO grew out of engineers’ interest in bringing a more open approach to handling industrial manufacturing data.
Van Leeckwyck advises that comprehensive approaches that engage both operations-side engineers and IT-side software developers are the best way to go about Industrial IoT projects. That can help free data so that it has uses beyond just the factory floor.
Challenges are found throughout the life cycle of IoT data, and range from high-level architecture to implementation details. For example, Van Leeckwyck said, it is important for front-line naming protocols and basic configurations to mesh with back-end data handling.
Overall a team must understand what its technology of choice is capable of, and what the business is trying to achieve. He said: “and the database developer should be responsible for making sure that the data can actually be collected and stored with the resolution and frequency needed.”
This need to deeply understand what a technology is capable of is a point I hear again and again, as I speak with end-users. What a technology can deliver, and in what kind of time frame — those are keys across the landscapes. Read more.
eCommerce Phenom Wayfair CTO View – In a low lit operations room in the upscale Back Bay neighborhood, technical teams watch monitors that show the electronic heartbeat of Wayfair.com’s data flow. Read more.
Head of data and knowledge management at the German Center for Diabetes Research – After more than 10 years of working in bioinformatics, Alexander Jarasch developed an aversion to relational databases — or at least the data joins that so often are central to relational queries. “I hate joins,” he said. “When you have data scattered over tables and you look for insights, it gets complicated.” Read more.
Esri user helps Syrian war refugees – Andrew Schroeder and his colleagues first implemented Survey123 in alpha form as part of a program to deliver medical aid to Syrian civil war refugees located in Jordan. The specific mission focused on skin problems, which can be a serious issue for refugees in arid climates with limited resources. Medical workers had to work quickly with a population in flux, while identifying conditions that required referral. Read more.
Talking Data Podcast (2013 – 2018)
Among the most exciting media developments in recent years have been podcasts. The podcast is an expansive medium, and – particularly — it’s given voice to a new generation of communicators. Over five years beginning in 2013 I had a chance to work on what came to be known as the Talking Data podcast with co-hosts Mark Brunelli and Ed Burns and with features editors and writers like Nicole Laskowski, Scot Petersen, and Ed Scannell. This sojourn roughly mapped to the initial ascent and eventual comeuppance of Big Data, a set of software technologies possessing what an old trade press writer would call “a slew” of “bells and whistles.”
Auld Lang Syne for Hadoop – 2018
It’s a Planet and a Database: Just Back from MongoDB World – 2014
Remembering Nate Silver Day at Gartner’s Grapevine Texas conference – 2013
XML/Web Services One Conference (2001 – 2004)
A formative experience in my career was the work I did on Web Services conferences for 101 Communications (now, 1105 Communications). A lot of the basic infrastructure for the conference came by way of the company’s acquisition of the SIGS Conference Group, but my colleagues and I had a lot to do with creating the program – I was a conference co-chair — for XML One and its later incarnation: XML Web Services One. XML was a very interesting moment in the evolution of software, although, these days, if it is remembered at all, it is with some disaffection – XML was not a developer favorite. It did pave the way for Service Oriented Architecture, the Semantic Web and JSON technology sub-unit trends, the latter as a straight-out “Storm the XML barricades” opponent. Today, the only evidence of “Web services” is a little cloud operation that uses the name as part of its moniker. As people involved with planning these types of conferences know well, there comes a time when you have to have sit-down brain-storming rap sessions where you try to predict “the next big thing.” XML and Web services set the stage for RSS, a mechanism that some would place as crucial in the ascendance of social media. That ascendance was so incandescent that it altered computing’s role in society to an astounding degree, and has yet to play out completely.
Finding “the next thing” will continue to drive most technology assessments. The lesson from the XML – Web services – SOA – and so forth experience is that sub-units of bounded technologies don’t really point successfully to the future. The trends of technology, just like real life, have an overlapping nature and the triggers for progress come from the surprising Connections* that transpire. Back in the XML Web services day an outlying technology called Grid or Utility computing was preparing to become more influential in the form of cloud technology; and blogging and threads were arising from Web development to forge social media juggernauts Facebook and Twitter. Hello, next big thing.
Here I’d like to note my respect and admiration for the late Mike Bucken, Application Development Trends editor, and the conference chair who brought me along for a great ride. Mike gathered a great group of co-conspirators that included Don Box, Tony Baer, Toufic Boubez, Michael Cusumano, and others. Conferences will continue to be an essential element in high-tech, providing the kind of face-to-face contact one needs to learn a topic fully.
The agendas for those long ago events are a bit hard to find these days. But I’m including a link here to my coverage of a Michael Cusumano keynote and interview. His musings on programming team organization show where DevOps and DataOps in businesses were about 15 years ago. At that time, the morays of cloud development were just beginning to swirl in Google data centers. More to come. Including some notes from a Webinar Cusumano presented on the nature of platforms.
At the XML Web Services One Conference – Cusumano on teams – 2003
Cusumano says the business of software is … software – 2004
XML: The last silver bullet – 2001
* Credit James Burke, author.