Recent content on David G. Simmons
TL;DR I built Duckling , a GUI for docling that saves you from having to remember 40+ command-line flags. If you just want to see the shiny new UI , feel free to skip ahead. Otherwise, stick around for the story of how I used AI coding assistants to build this thing, and what I learned along the way. Quick links if you want to dive in: GitHub Repository | Live Documentation | Security Warning Why…
What a Year! 2025 has been, without a doubt, one helluva year! From the lowest lows to some pretty great highs, it’s been a rollercoaster of emotions, growth, and changes. I’ll recap as much as I can, but some details will, of course, be left out. Starting Low The lowest of the lows of 2025 actually started at the tail end of 2024 when I discovered that my marriage was over. Yeah, that…
TL;DR The venerable Raspberry Pi has been around for over a decade (officially created in 2009) and it has become a standard in many robotics, home automation, and other types of uses. Especially for “makers” and other tinkerers. But it has also made serious inroads into the professional and enterprise world – just more quietly. It’s a capable, reliable, and powerful Single Board Computer (SBC)…
Wait, what?!? I know, I know, it seems like I’ve been changing jobs a lot lately. So much so that I haven’t even written posts about some of them. Note: This has always been one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons from way back in the day when I lived in NYC. In the 1980s, this was a real phenomenon on the Upper West Side.
Having an update brick (render inoperable) your device is a real risk, and even the largest of companies have been known to have it happen. This has just happened to Apple ( Apple pauses iPadOS 18 rollout for M4 iPad Pro after bricking complaints ) and I think we’re all well aware of the Crowdstrike incident by now. It’s such an issue that, given the recent disasters with update…
I’ve been interviewing a lot lately (and no, I don’t want to talk about it). I’m asked almost all the time “How do you define Developer Relations?” and this post is the long-form answer to that question. I’m writing it because almost every interviewer I’ve given this to has said some form of “that’s a really good analogy! You should write that…
Archival posts Over time I have written a lot of content for a variety of employers, publishers, etc. and, while those folks may (or may not) still have that content available I wanted to make sure that I preserved it here for myself. I have a lot of content that I am proud of and I want to make sure that I can find it again. 2019 2018 Monitoring Wireless Interfaces 2017 ThingMonk 2017 Zero to…
This post was originally published on InfluxData’s Blog Monitoring Discourse We here at InfluxData use Discourse for our Community (you’re a member of our Community, right? No? Well, go sign up!!) Part of my job here at InfluxData is to keep my eye on the community, answer questions, and work to grow the community. And part of that, of course, is metrics. It always comes down to what you can…
I know it may seem like this happens all the time, but I’ve left Camunda and started a new position. (I’ll get to where in a minute.) Though it may seem from this , and this that I change jobs all the time, that’s not entirely true. Earlier in my career, things were very different. I worked at Sun Microsystems (a moment of silence, as always) for 15 years and, had Oracle not…
Arduino HTTPClient Failure I don’t know if anyone else has ever tried this, but I just spent the better part of a week trying to debug this little problem, so I thought maybe I’d save someone some time. I was trying to use WiFiClientSecure along with HTTPClient to POST to an authentication server that is fronted by cloudflare. No matter what I did, I got error messages. I was sending a…
Some background I’ve written a bit about using Camunda to do all sorts of things from automating IoT processes to helping with the management of a Slack community. Ok, so I haven’t written about all of those things, but I’ve certainly done them. In all of those projects I’ve used Camunda Platform 7 to deploy and run my processes, but most of the actual work was done by…
Note: Originally published on DZone so don’t forget to give it some ❤️ over there! Running this project Clone the repository cd into the project directory: Deploy the co2.bpmn process definition to your Camunda server cd into the task-worker directory: run go mod tidy to update the task-worker module adjust all constant values in the task-handler.go file run go run task-handler.go cd into…
I can safely say that I’ve never done this before, but it’s been really fun to do (and surprisingly quick, but I’ll get to that.) What’s ’this’? I wrote a Go module. Wait, what? Yep, I wrote a complete Go module that does nearly instantaneous translations for aspects of time – like months, days of the week, etc. Doesn’t Go provide…
Some Background When I first started at Camunda back in October, 2020 (what was 2020 anyway?) the very first thing I was asked to do was come up with something I could do for a special Halloween blog post . It being COVID-times, I of course built a Camunda and IoT integration to evaluate costumes and deliver candy. I am sort of well-known for doing weird, pointless IoT projects like this one and…
This is Part II in the series covering a Proof of Concept (PoC) project I’m working on as part of my job as Principal Developer Advocate at Camunda . I’m not sure how many posts will be in the series, but, well, at least two? If you missed Part I , you might want to catch up on it before continuing. This part of the project was the first hardware build of the project. I have now built…
Have you ever had someone say something to you that forced you to entirely re-evaluate everything you’ve thought about yourself? It’s only happened to me a couple of times in my life, but it has been life-altering every time. Background 35 years ago or so I met this person. We’ll call her ‘Nancy’. We moved in the same friend circles. We knew all the same people,…
I’m working on this massive IoT project this quarter (you can read about it if you’re interested) which is going to be a big hardware build, lots of software, and a bunch of Camunda Platform BPMN . I’ve never really live-streamed before because, you know, who wants to watch me do stupid stuff? Live Stream! My friend Rain was starting to dabble in IoT hardware and software, so I…
A Proof of Concept for Camunda Platform BPMN with IoT Abstract Looking to bring Camunda to the attention of the IoT Community by completing a larger IoT/Camunda Proof of Concept Project. This would entail an IoT Build, using Camunda Platform, documentation, a blog post, and promotion to the wider IoT Community. Why pursue this project In many of my initial discussions when joining the company, IoT…
Look, we’re all different, and that’s a Good Thing™! We all think, act, and most importantly, communicate, differently. To that end I thought I’d write up this short guide to working with and communicating with me. A Guide to Working with David G. Simmons Pronouns: He/Him Title: Principal Developer Advocate Location: Apex, NC Working Hours & Timezone: Roughly 8:00 am - 8:00 pm US…
This started as a simple post to an internal Slack group. Then I got asked to post it to another channel in that Slack. Then I decided to post it to the DevRel Collective Slack. At which point I was asked to make it a blog post so it didn’t get lost in the scroll-back (DevRel Collective uses a free Slack account, so we can only scroll back 10,000 messages. With 2,000+ members, that happens…
I get it, I’m late to the party on this one. I’m old, I’m set in my ways, and I don’t like change. Get over it. Chasing a Bug I was developing a Slack-bot for the DevRelCollective and I had it almost working. Well, to be fair, I had it working for a while, then I broke something. And then I was trying to fix what I broke, and all hell broke loose.
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…
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…
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…
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…