Recent content in Blog on Jeremy Theocharis
I almost agree with all of the LLM critics, yet I still use LLMs a lot. I know this sounds like I am delusional, and I also feel like that sometimes because of this dissonance, but I don’t think I am alone with it. This week I was at Local-First Conf in Berlin, and the dissonance was everywhere. Armin Ronacher had just given a talk about building machine entities . He created Flask and was one of…
A Go function in our application kept getting cancelled in production. The function had a tight timeout. The same code ran fine in our development setups, in our CI and CD pipelines, in every integration test we had. In production it would sometimes blow past the timeout and die with context deadline exceeded . What made it worse was the state machine library 1 we used. When its context got…
A friend of mine is a veterinarian doing his PhD in something with milk. On a hike last year, I asked him why you can buy buttermilk when hiking in the Austrian alps at every alp, but not milk. He gave a very detailed answer. The others on the hike quietly moved ahead. You know the type. The guy at a party who explains every regional train model operating in the greater Cologne area. Except this…
tokens go brrrr. TIL Claude Code’s Agent Teams are a Mr. Meeseeks Box. With --dangerously-skip-permissions , all spawned agents inherit no-permission mode. From the docs : “If the lead runs with –dangerously-skip-permissions, all teammates do too.” It’s the Meeseeks Box with no adult supervision.
We have been in all types of industries all around the world. Every factory we walked into had the same problem. A maintenance engineer can’t figure out why machines keep failing. A manager can’t answer “how much did we produce yesterday?” without three phone calls. A quality team can’t trace a defect to its source. The data exists. Scattered across USB sticks,…
Beyond compressed air and electricity, data should be the third resource every factory runs on. Today, it’s blocked. A maintenance engineer can’t figure out why machines fail. The data exists. Scattered across USB sticks, databases, Excel sheets. Every hour you spend on integration is an hour not spent creating business value. We’ve lived it. I’m Jeremy, co-founder of UMH.…
This guide is for LLMs and humans. Identity You are writing as a frustrated expert. Someone who knows the topic deeply, has watched others explain it badly, and is slightly frustrated but genuinely wants to teach. You combine: Academic depth (citations, numbers, 80-90h of research) Practitioner cynicism (skepticism of vendor promises, buzzwords) Educator patience (analogies, inline definitions,…
I was young and needed the money. I wrote Human-written, certified AI slop™ when I was studying. Articles about couches. Furniture companies hired students like me to write content that would make their websites rank higher in Google. “Write about advantages, disadvantages. Incorporate these keywords.” The content was shitty because it was never supposed to be read. Just meant to game…
If you live in Germany, you have been treated like livestock by Deutsche Bahn (DB). Almost all of my friends have a story: they traveled with DB, got thrown out in the middle of the night in some cow village, and had to wait hours for the next train. I have something better. I was kidnapped. December 24th, 2025. 15:30. Cologne Main Station, Platform 9 D-G. I am taking the RE5 (ID 28521) to my…
In modern industrial IoT, data downsampling is essential to tame the flood of sensor readings without losing important information. Many historians and Unified Namespace implementations tout huge “compression” ratios (like 1000:1 ), but it’s often downsampling —intentionally dropping redundant data, that achieves these gains. This article summarizes a series of short videos on downsampling…
Manufacturing “AI” is, frankly, a dumpster fire. The flames look impressive in every conference demo, but try standing next to them for an entire shift and you will feel the heat. This article is about using LLM’s in manufacturing - not the other AI’s like for example visual quality inspection. I pay $200 a month for ChatGPT‑Pro, use Cursor in MAX mode and talk about AI every single…
Most MQTT explanations suck - they are either confusing or too technical or skip the big-picture context entirely. You deserve better. This guide aims to clarify what MQTT is, how it works, and how it fits into the overall context of IT and OT After years of building Industrial IoT solutions and speaking with MQTT and AMQP committee members, I realized how often MQTT is misapplied, which leads to…
Revised December 2025: Simplified for readability. Full algorithm in addendum . Writing technical articles is an art. This is wrong. It’s a methodological process. And this isn’t new. Effective technical writing draws from centuries of tradition: from Aristotle and Cicero to modern cognitive research. You’ve likely seen this in action, even if authors weren’t consciously…
No, you don’t have to use AWS or Azure. While AWS and Azure are industry leaders, their advantages often only show up at massive scales. In many cases, they lead to escalating costs and vendor lock-in without delivering proportional benefits. If your organization hasn’t yet committed to a cloud provider or negotiated fixed contracts, it’s worth looking at alternatives like Hetzner . In this…
This isn’t one of my usual engineering write-ups, nor is it a marketing piece. Instead, I want to share the core principles that drive us on the UMH product team and explain why we’ve built our product the way we have. Read this article if you are interested about our product roadmap and how we differentiate ourselves from the market. At UMH , our goal is to create an integrated and cohesive…
Note: This blog article is based on the presentation given by Jeremy Theocharis at Cloudland 2024 and was written together with Denis Gontcharov Connecting a USB stick to the “cloud” seems to be a stupid thing to do. Yet, it is something that we must do if we want to increase the efficiency of our world’s production and therefore reduce CO2. Nearly every factory in the world,…
It couldn’t get much worse. On one hand, manufacturers are wasting substantial amounts of time and money attempting to implement OPC UA. On the other hand, it’s driving innovation because its shortcomings are almost comically obvious that more and more companies feel fooled by established market vendors and begin seeking alternative solutions. They are frustrated with the status-quo…
You are skeptical. You are skeptical of buzzwords. You are skeptical because in the past 10 years of Industry 4.0, nothing really changed. And now there are random people on the internet talking about this “Unified Namespace” or in short “UNS”. Of course, you are skeptical. But you are also open to new concepts; otherwise, you would have never clicked on this article.…
TL;DR aka “Executive Summary” can be found at the end of the article “Never change a running system.” It’s a philosophy I’ve always adhered to. Excitement in tech usually equates to instability, something I’m not particularly fond of. It might sound strange coming from a startup CTO, but let me explain in this article what I mean. If you’ve found…
Open-source databases have recently been stealing the spotlight in numerous industries, including process sectors such as oil and gas, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and utilities. Historically, Historians were the preferred choice due to their user-friendly domain-specific tools, smooth interaction with industrial equipment, and most notably, their high compression rates. However, the notion of…
This blog post was first presented at the Building IoT 2023 conference in Munich, Germany, under the title “Tools & Techniques for Scalable Data Processing in Industrial IoT.” It has since been rewritten for publication as a blog article. You can refer to the original announcement here. Embarking on the journey to design an efficient IT/OT infrastructure can be a daunting task, given…
Operating Systems (OS) play an important role in the world of Industrial IoT, serving as the foundation for various applications and processes. Regardless of the intended use, whether it be data extraction, data visualization, or deployment of microservices and Kubernetes clusters, an operating system is essential for running the necessary software and applications, including the United…
Unified Namespace, also known as event-driven architecture, is a system in which all data is published, regardless of whether there is a consumer for it. MQTT is a popular protocol for transmitting data between machines and is often used in Unified Namespace. When choosing an MQTT broker, it’s common for companies to ask about comparisons between different options, such as “HiveMQ vs…
(Podcast episode available on the original article on learn.umh.app.) In the current age of Industrial IoT, historians like OSIsoft PI or Canary sometimes seem dusty and expensive, especially when compared to modern time series databases like InfluxDB , TimescaleDB , or the cloud equivalents of AWS and Azure. Especially for people coming from IT backgrounds, the benefits of a data historian…
(Podcast episode available on the original article on learn.umh.app.) The United Manufacturing Hub is an Open-Source toolkit to build your own reliable and secure Industrial IoT platform. We’ve been working since 2017 in the field of data processing in Industrial IoT / manufacturing. We began with a naïve “send all data to the cloud” approach and through various industry projects…
Most people know Node-RED from the areas of smart home or programming introductions (those workshops where you connect things with microcontrollers). Yet, very few people realize that it is frequently used in manufacturing as well. For those of you that do not know it yet, here is the official self-description from the Node-RED website: Node-RED is a programming tool for wiring together hardware…
For a more broad perspective on the topic, check out our article Historians vs Open-Source databases ! Introduction The introduction and implementation of an Industrial IoT strategy is already complicated and tedious. There is no need to put unnecessary obstacles in the way through lack of stability, new programming languages, or more databases than necessary. You need a piece of software that you…