Face Palming on the Way to a Trade Show
Let me start off by saying this is the good kind of face palm. KnowThings is an accelerator incubation project of CA Technologies. We are building an IoT device virtualizer. To show the value of what we built, we are building a demo with a couple devices that we are going to capture the interactions of live, on stage, at CA World.
One of the benefits of running my startup under the CA umbrella is that I get to go to CA World and show off our innovative approach to accelerating IoT development to some of the largest and most successful companies in the world. As of yesterday I had a very nice demo of our PseudoThings prototype. It showed how easy it is to create a new simulation, and was a all around good way to show some of our core value proposition. At KnowThings, all around good is the bare minimum, so despite the risk I had asked our CXO, Daniel Guo, to do some last minute improvements to our Greenhouse demo application to really give me the pictures that would be worth a thousand words.
Yes a code change, the day before showtime. To make matters worse, Daniel is currently working from China and so we have the very typical time zone delay in doing updates. Last night Daniel gives me the drop, but I had already packed up the gateway and devices I was planning to use for our CA World demo and said I’d test tomorrow once I got to Vegas. So do you know why I’m face palming yet? I had a last minute update to code, that needed testing, and I couldn’t do it, because I had already packed my devices and gateways into my bag and didn’t want to risk forgetting something if I unpacked.
It wasn’t until I got to DFW airport and due to uncharacteristically light traffic and had a whole hour before my flight that I realized, we had already built a prototype that solves this exact problem. This is the exact problem that KnowThings was meant to solve, and I wasn’t using Knowthings to solve it! I quickly used captures that I had made of previous devices to give myself a model to test against. What do you know, it worked. Problem solved. Whew.
If you’ve read my previous blog posts (here and here), you know traveling and coding is half of what lead to KnowThings. Right now, instead of worrying about a last minute code update, I’ve tested our new application using a pseudothing to simulate our Edge Device and I have confidence that my demo at CA World will look awesome. This is releasing with confidence. OK, so my release is a trade show demo, but right now that is my “production.” I also know that those pictures will tell the right thousand word story. The graphs are realistic representations of the data we recorded on previous runs with our real devices.
So my forehead is a little red, but I’ve got the time to write this post, instead of fretting about the demo. I know it works. If by chance you’re at CA World, please head over to CA’s Accelerator Zone where you can find me and Menka, our CTO, and check out all the other cool and innovative projects funded by the CA Accelerator.