Week 4-9
10 Aug 2017Rather predictably, I’m already 6 weeks behind on my weekly notes of what I’m doing. So here’s a bumper catch up.
Weeks 4 + 5 were focussed on three things; sorting out some fixes for issues that slipped into 0.17, writing up the Node-RED roadmap to take us to version 1.0 and preparing for upcoming events.
The end of week 5 was the FullStack conference itself. I could only make it on the last day, when I was scheduled to speak. When I arrived, all the sessions of the day were written up on a whiteboard and everyone could vote on which talk they planned to see. The organisers then used that to assign the sessions to the different sized rooms. Slightly unfortunately the title of my talk had been lost somewhere along the way, so was simply listed as “Node-RED”. I got a roomful of 30 or so people; many of who had heard of Node-RED already. With the talk done, I couldn’t hang around for the other sessions as I had to get home ahead of a weekend away.
Week 6 started with us publishing the Node-RED roadmap to version 1.0. It was great to get that shared and start to get feedback from the community on it. Its an ambitious roadmap - I said in the blog post the goal is to get there by the end of the year. I suspect it will by a bit later than that, but it sets out the tone and direction of the project nicely.
One of the more interesting things I did this week was to spend a bit of time talking with a startup who were having some issues with Node-RED. They were using it to create bots for social-media engagement and had a high profile event coming up that they expected to drive particular high workloads through the system. I reviewed their flows and provided some feedback on areas that were potential bottlenecks. A few days later I heard back that they had implemented some of the suggestions and were happy it was handling the workload they needed it to.
Week 7 was mostly spent in San Francisco for Node Summit. On Monday I took the opportunity to have a catch up over breakfast with Matt Biddulph, followed by an impromptu Node-RED talk as his new company. I then spent the rest of the day at the Galvanize office where IBM were hosting an IoT workshop in the afternoon, followed by a meetup in the evening at which I did my Node-RED talk.
Tuesday was the Day Zero part of NodeSummit where I did my full Node-RED talk to a packed room and got to see lots of other great talks. If anything, there was too much good stuff - the afternoon session had 6 back-to-back 30 minute talks with no break. For a jet lagged Brit who hadn’t had a decent cup of tea for a few days, I definitely faded out.
The week ended somewhat abruptly the next day when I found myself having to rearrange flights to get home two days early. I have to say a big thanks to American Express Global Business Travel who showed a great deal of empathy and great customer service when they agreed to refund the $900 fee Delta Airlines charged me without any empathy or good customer service to change the ticket.
Week 8 was a bit all over the place.
Week 9 was back to normal somewhat, but most notably came the announcement that Hitachi are adopting Node-RED as the tooling for their Lumada IoT platform. We’ve been working with Hitachi for the last few months, discussing their requirements and how Node-RED can fit with what they are doing. The roadmap we published a couple weeks ago has certainly been influenced by their involvement and I look forward to their contribution growing.
I also kept the Emerging Technologies’ 3D printer busy building a TJ Bot - more on that soon.
And that brings us to today - Toby’s 7th birthday. We’ve just watched Star Wars (A New Hope) for the first time - although he knows it backwards thanks to the various Lego versions he’s already seen. And I’ve taken the opportunity to get these notes written up.
Next week is a holiday, so there won’t be any updates, but hopefully it won’t be another 6 weeks before I write again.