Trip Report: Sierra Wireless Innovation Summit and NDC Oslo

I spent the last week traveling, first to Paris, to attend the Sierra Wireless Innovation Summit, then to Oslo for NDC.
At the Innovation Summit in Paris, Sierra Wireless introduced a new open hardware project called Project mangOH. This is basically a base board for Sierra Wireless (and also other manufacturer’s) embedded modules, based on CF3 connectors. However, what makes this board different from other boards is that it has three so-called IoT connectors, which allow you to easily add new capabilities to the board, e.g. I/O modules, ZigBee, Bluetooth, etc. Furthermore, the board has an integrated Arduino Leonardo including support for Arduino shields, which should make it very popular in the Maker scene. Very cool.

I was showing macchina.io running on the mangOH with the new WP8548 module running Yocto Linux.

After the Innovation Summit I traveled to Norway, where I gave a talk at NDC Oslo. This year, NDC Oslo, which is historically focused on Microsoft technologies, included an IoT and C++ track, so this was a good opportunity to talk about macchina.io. Of the 20-30 people in my talk only two had heard about the POCO C++ Libraries, so we definitely have to do much more in terms of getting known in the C++ community. POCO is still seems to be the best kept secret in the C++ world.

NDC is a great conference. From a speaker’s point of view: they have full HD projectors (or screens), and speakers have their own monitor showing what’s being displayed on the big screen(s) behind. Great for doing demos, as I don’t have to switch my MacBook to mirror mode and back when I switch from the presentation to the demo. Another cool feature they have is the “overflow area” where they display simultaneous live video streams from all nine parallel tracks. Audio is provided via wireless headphones that can be switched to the track you want to listen to. Also, they cover speaker’s travel costs (flight and hotel), which is very cool.

Two of the more popular issues at the conference were security (great keynote by Bruce Schneier) and functional programming. Functional programming seems to be the hot new answer to all software development issues that have been plaguing us for the last 50 years or so. As someone who’s been doing this for 20+ years, I’m a bit sceptical… we’ll see what how new paradigm will come along in 10 years or so. I mean, functional programming certainly has its advantages, but I see it as just another tool in my toolbox.

After NDC I had some time to enjoy Oslo, which is a fantastic city.