DevCon IV, The Resurrection: Part 2

So, after wolfing down a lunch of Czech dumplings from the ample buffet and walking past the Giveth guy (who I didn’t know at the time and just thought was wearing a bad Halloween costume), I headed to the talk by Golem, out of curiosity since I had no idea who they were. Plus, since we were in Prague, it seemed appropriate. And after a few confused minutes, I finally got it. Wow.

Basically, Golem was offering a secure platform that decentralized the notion of buying and selling cycles of computing power. Instead of AWS EC2 and Azure VM, you could purchase your power from anonymous sources around the world. And on the other side of the coin, you could become an independent vendor, offering your computers as computing providers on the network. As a vendor, you’d just install their software on your machines. Of course, one would think of all the possible questions about trust on such a platform, but it seemed that Golem had those bases covered.

And how does Ethereum fit into all of this madness? It’s the transaction-based layer of the platform, of course! All agreements and purchases would occur within the Ethereum blockchain. How beautiful is that: one decentralized platform supporting another! After that lecture, I was hungry to discover what other projects were being developed with Ethereum in mind. So, where to next?!

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Quick Tangent: It’s Probably for the Best

So, it’s been a while since I talked about indoor navigation. It’s one of those things that I always come back to, especially since that idea for the ghost game always comes back to me now and again. After a conversation with a hardware grad student in a PhD program, I got excited about the idea again and went looking once more for a software solution. As it turns out, Microsoft wants in on the action. After playing with it for a while, though, there’s only one problem: much like other indoor navigation solutions, it doesn’t work exactly.

In my apartment several stories up and which occupies only one floor, I will walk several feet. Then it will suddenly prompt me, asking me which floor I’m headed to. Apparently, it thinks that I’m in an elevator or on an escalator.

With all the difficulties amassed between AR and navigation, it’s no wonder that Project Tango was closed by Google. And it’s no wonder that this Microsoft navigation project apparently hasn’t been updated for a year now. After all, AR and indoor navigation are tough subjects to tackle.

So, it’s refreshing to hear that Microsoft might be rethinking some of its past approaches. After having experimented with their earlier iterations of Windows IoT, I found it an interesting foray for Microsoft. However, I didn’t really believe that it’d be adopted by manufacturers and (especially) developers. It seems that Microsoft has had the same realization recently, and it’s now pursuing a new project to revamp their IoT (and mobile, to some degree) portfolio called Azure Sphere. Now, this initiative could maybe breathe new life into some of that confused tech. If somebody out there creates a kit for Azure Sphere, I’m a taker. I’m looking at you, Adafruit!

Initial Impressions of MatterMost

Having low expectations due to being old and jaded, I downloaded the Slack-alternative package known as MatterMost and then proceeded to install it onto Red Hat with their instructions. (Slack would seem like an obvious choice, but it’s a less viable candidate for enterprise due to a number of possible reasons: contracts with competing vendors, auditing, corporate secrets, etc.). First and foremost, I appreciated the readability of their straightforward description regarding the prerequisite steps, even before installing the actual product. (Since my teenage days of being a part-time administrator are long gone, I need somebody to hold my hand.) The installation of the product itself was also fairly easy, and I was able to get it working quickly thereafter. If I hadn’t been busy with a few other things at the time, it might have taken me only a few minutes to prepare everything. So, kudos to Mattermost for that! Plus, just like Slack, I was able to communicate with the server through a number of available clients.

But I wasn’t here for just an inhouse chat server, though that’s pretty cool. Instead, as I mentioned in my last post, I was here to investigate the possibility of deploying useful bots for my team. In the same way that Atomist’s bots help software companies manage their projects, I’d like to create my own bots that can help monitor and control the custom distributed architecture that exists inside our walls. For the more interactive bots, they have two types of web hooks: incoming and outgoing. Since I wanted to keep it simple, I went with the Slash commands. Now, you have to pay close attention here, since they have explicit instructions on how to implement the callback correctly. (Do not stray from the instructions, or you will face certain doom.) However, if you follow them exactly, the Slash command will work without fail. I created a simple bot that returned markup text for a table, which displayed the status of several daemons running on our servers. Again, I was impressed!

So, now, what’s next? Well, long ago, I wrote an InfoQ article about creating web apps that were driven by a MDD architecture. In this case, I don’t see why the same couldn’t be employed with a set of bots. With a little bit of planning, I can envision simple yet effective tools available through such a network. Constructed within a MDD framework, their functionality could be adjusted with just a few modifications to metadata. So, much like a Silicon Valley project manager can get the status of a software build while texting on his phone with a colleague, it’s now possible for me to chat and run a few commands against my distributed architecture. (Finally, I won’t have to whip out the laptop and dial into the VPN every time something happens.) And all while still fitting into corporate compliance! Well, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but it’s now looking much more feasible now than a few weeks ago. And I still have to sell it to the brass…but I got my fingers crossed.