Many of my blog posts are actually a “note to self”. Things I write down in order not to forget them. This one even goes a bit further. So save yourself some time and skip it ;-)
10 years ago I started an adventure1. Creating an open source SCADA system and a business with that. Having an open source SCADA system was not the business case back then, it was just a side effect.
So in those 10 years a lot of things haven happened. Just think back a moment, there was no “smart phone” back then. Although there was Java 5, most of us hesitated and stuck with 1.4, not having generics. 32bit was standard. Raspberry PIs had not been invented yet (though I did have a Lego Mindstorms NXT). There was no Git and you could be lucky if you had Subversion. Not talking about services like GitHub, Travis-CI or other hipster cloud things.
Also in the area that I worked, let’s just label it “SCADA”, a lot has happened. During that time we developed openSCADA, which later became an Eclipse project named “Eclipse SCADA” and now “Eclipse NeoSCADA”. And similar things happened in that industry field. Instead of having closed source, C based, isolated systems, we now have a more open field, where data is transmitted using virtual machine based systems, wrapping up data in XML or JSON structures2, re-use code from open source projects. And quite many of those things happen in the Eclipse IoT working group and top-level project, which I am glad to be a part of.
Looking back 10 years again, Eclipse was an IDE like Apache was a web server3. And today both foundations govern a huge set of projects, far away from their original starting points and quite a sum of them has, in some way, to do with IoT.
So I am really looking forward to next Monday, when I will start a new position at the IoT team of RedHat. To me, this is a great opportunity and a great adventure into the next 10 years. I am sure that a lot will happen in the area of IoT, communication between devices and services. And I appreciate it that I can be a part of this.
But also will I miss what I am leaving behind. Not only the software that I made and the things I have accomplished, but, more important, colleagues who became friends.
1 To be honest, it was 10 years and 3 months ago. Then again the first three months were more preparing than actually doing.
2 Not sure if this is an improvement, but it is the way it goes.
3 I know it was more back then already, but not as it is now