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Day one of the new job: Developer evangelist at SMARTRAC!

Photo: American Airlines jet as seen from below, taking off. Headline: New job - DAY ONE.

Today — Monday, October 3rd, 2016 — marks the start of my new gig, Developer Evangelist at SMARTRAC, a leading manufacturer of high-security RFID inlays and tags, and the world’s largest supplier of RFID inlays for “e-passports”, according to Wikipedia.

Logo: SMARTRAC / Connect Things

SMARTRAC manufacture a wide variety of RFID inlays and tags for all sorts of uses, ranging from asset tracking and supply chain management to access control to contactless payment (such as “tap” credit cards) to remote keyless entry for cars to animal identification to tickets for concerts and sports events to retail sales and anti-counterfeiting protection.

Photo: A roll of SMARTRAC 'DogBone' RFID tags. The tiny black dot in the center of the tag is the actual RFID chip; the dogbone-shaped metal trace making up most of the tag is the antenna.

SMARTRAC started as a hardware company producing radio frequency transponders and reader, but they’ve seen that a lot of the opportunity is in the software that talks to this hardware and in the emerging internet of things (IoT).

Logo: SMARTCOSMOS - Powered by SMARTRAC

That’s where SMART COSMOS comes in. It’s SMARTRAC’s portfolio of cloud-based services that enables developers to build new applications that can work with SMARTRAC’s RFID tags and inlays to “read the world”.

Here’s the official “SMART COSMOS 101” video:

SMART COSMOS needs someone who can wear a number of hats:

  • Developers will be writing applications that make use of SMART COSMOS’ SaaS services, and they’re going to need someone who can speak their language to show them how it’s done.
  • A number of SMARTRAC’s clients are the sales and marketing departments of large retail operations, and they’ll need to someone who can operate in both the worlds of marketing and technology.
  • And finally, SMARTRAC makes appearances at conference worldwide — a quick glance at their site says that they’ll be a conferences in Vegas, Munich, Tehran, Cannes, and Manila before the end of the year — and they’ll need a skilled speaker and presenter to promote their wares.

You know who’s really good at all of these? This guy:

This is a remote job, with me working from the home office…

…but punctuated with trips to conferences where SMARTRAC will have a booth or will be presenting and developer gatherings, visits to the U.S. office in Baltimore or the European office, and possibly SMARTRAC’s RFID manufacturing facilities, which are scattered all over the globe.

Photo: The city of Asheville, North Carolina in the sunset (or sunrise), with forest in the foreground and mountains in the background. Heading: HELLO, ASHEVILLE!

Day one of the job has me on the road to one of those aforementioned manufacturing facilities. I’m off to Asheville, North Carolina to visit the SMARTRAC plant there, and spend the next few days working with my new team on a developer evangelism plan for SMARTTRAC. This will be interesting, and I’ll be posting quite a bit on this topic, so watch this space!

9 replies on “Day one of the new job: Developer evangelist at SMARTRAC!”

Hey, Joey.

Congrats! All the best in your new role – may it bring you laughs, learning, friendships and success. And I know you’ll get all of that from this role – it was meant for you to fill it!

-Paul

Those SMARTRAC “DogBone” RFID tags would look more worthy of this blog if they weren’t in a roll but were folded accordion-style. Congrats on the new job!

[…] My new job — Technology Evangelist at SMARTRAC, an “internet of things” company that will be making some big moves next year — has kept me busy with orientation, work, and travel. As a result, I haven’t been able to put together a meetup in the past couple of months. Now that I’ve gone through the initial “breaking in” phase with the new job, my schedule’s a little more settled, and Tampa iOS Meetups can resume. […]

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