The comic is the creation of the dev team at Toggl, the time tracking tool. Come to think of it, since I’m contract-to-hire at my new job for the next six months, I should sign up for an account.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
“We are reaching an inflection point with our strategy,” says Chen. “Our financial foundation is strong, and our pivot to software is taking hold.” The sea change may keep the company alive, but it’ll be a far different entity than the industry-defining behemoth it once was.
The reason I’ve been busy: I’m in the middle of transitioning from my current job to a new one.
I’ve enjoyed my time as a GSG’s Platform Evangelist. Landing a job with GSG was a very lucky break. From the fall of 2012 to the end of 2013, I ran a telecom consultancy with a former high school friend, and through his hustling and my presentations and documentation, we managed to pick up Rogers (a big Canadian telco with fingers in lots of pies from publishing to cable TV to sports teams — think of them Canuck version of Time Warner) as a client.
That job should’ve made me some decent coin, but it pretty much drained my bank account. That’s because my former friend pretty took all the money for himself while telling the rest of us that we’d get paid soon, “once the client paid us”. I was going broke and paying rent with my blogging profits (fortunately, I was having a hot streak with ad revenue at the time) while my friend started leasing a big house in Oakville, bought a new car, and who knows what else, a fact I discovered when invited to his house one Saturday for a little get-together.
Although working with my former friend turned out to have a lot of downside, there was one significant upside: it got me in touch with GSG. They were also working with Rogers, and loved the presentations and documentation that I produced. They offered me some contract work, which grew into my current job. They sponsored my TN-1 status, which allowed me to work in the U.S., and my first day as a GSGer was March 10, 2014.
I’m thankful for all the things I got to do at GSG, from helping them create a new web site, to changing all their marketing material, to working on interesting projects with GSG partners. I got us our moment on a Times Square billboard:
A GSG press release on a Times Square billboard. Click to see at full size.
I did a number of webcasts with partners, including Enterprise Mobile (a subsidiary of Honeywell)…
…and made a number of videos like this one for IBM, for which I wrote the script, created the graphics, did the narration, and assembled the video:
One of the highlights of my time at GSG was getting to meet (and perform on stage with) the folks at the office in Pune, India:
It was working for GSG that allowed me to move to Tampa to be with Anitra, make enough money to get out of the debt that working for my former friend had put me in, and help cover the costs of a wedding. For giving me the chance to start my new life in a subtropical paradise with a lovely lady, I will always be grateful to GSG.
I leave GSG with no small amount of reluctance. They’re great people to work with. GSG’s COO Amine Doukkali was impressed enough by my work and accordion playing to introduce me to CEO Andy Goorno and President Dan Hughes. I soon began work with Dan Goorno, Phil Caruso, Shauna Heydecker, Chris Martin, and Eric Goldman, as well as Mohan Sathe and Sudhir Bapat, who run the India branch, and so many other solid people.
The field that GSG is in — a mix of telecom expense management, enterprise mobility and networking management, and communications lifecycle management — is filled with companies many times GSG’s size, but you wouldn’t know it by its work. GSG punches well above its weight class because its people go above and beyond what anyone should expect. I’m leaving only because an exceedingly rare and precious opportunity came up — otherwise, I’d have gladly continued my work at GSG. I’m proud to have worked there, and would glad cross paths with them in the future.
Thank you, GSG for everything; I hope you benefited from my being there as much as I did.
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering what my new job is. I’ll tell you later this week.
I’ve been seeings reports from friends on Facebook and Twitter of warnings about using Samsung Galaxy Note 7 devices on flights.
Sutha Kamal, VP Technology Strategy for Technicolor, whom I know from DemoCamp Toronto, was on a KLM flight this morning. He posted on Facebook that one of the safety announcements was “It is strictly forbidden to turn on or charge your Samsung Galaxy 7 phone on this place”. I wonder how actively they had the flight crew looking for Galaxy Note 7s (and not Galaxy 7s, which don’t have the battery problem), what with everything else they have to do.
In response to Sutha’s post, Stuart MacDonald, principal at his Toronto-based consulting company said that Air Canada is doing gate checks for Galaxy Note 7s, and another friend of Sutha’s said that United did the same last Friday.
Farhan Thawar, formerly Mobile CTO and VP Engineering at Pivotal Labs, and currently co-founder of a startup in stealth mode, tweeted this:
Flight attendant just reminded us that @samsung Galaxy Note 7 devices must be completely turned off for this flight @AirCanada
Potentially embarrassing and even dangerous technological flaws are a fact of life for every hardware company—they may be extremely rare, but they are an ever present risk. What sets the best companies apart from others is their ability to respond in a way that preserves their brand and wins back the trust of customers. Unfortunately, I can’t imagine a worse situation for Samsung than having what amounts to a public service announcement before every flight advising customers not to use your product.
Looking for some programming puzzles to test your skill? Try return true to win, a site that challenges you to complete the JavaScript functions it gives you to return the value true. It will also remind you how full of “wat” JavaScript is.
