đź‘‹ An Introduction - Particle Developer Evangelist

General
1

Hi there everyone!

My name is Brandon Satrom, and I joined Particle this week as our first Developer Evangelist. Since I’ll be meeting and working with many of you here on the forums, elsewhere online and in-person, I thought I should say hello and introduce myself.

I’ve been a technology professional for nearly 18 years. Most of my career has been in the software world, and I’ve worked as a developer, architect, evangelist and Product Manager in that time.

In the last half-dozen years, I worked for Microsoft as a Developer Evangelist, then Telerik, where I worked as a Product Manager and led product teams, all of which were focused on building tools designed to help developers get their jobs done, faster.

In parallel to all of this, I’ve spent the last 4-ish years as a self-taught maker and tinkerer. Like many of you, I’ve been a fan of Particle since the Spark days and have a number of Cores, Photons and even a few Electrons deployed across various done and half-done projects in my house.

I also have a deep passion for Maker/STEM education, and started a maker ed publishing company last year. Our focus is introducing kids to electronics through stories, and we launched our first book via Kickstarter, which just started shipping last month.

As a Developer Evangelist, my role will be to help developers build awesome connected things with Particle product and tools, for fun and profit. Among the myriad things I’ll be doing are:

  • Working to help flesh out and expand our online resources;

  • Helping to make sure our developer tools and experiences are second-to-none;

  • Amplifying the cool things you’re all doing internally and around the web;

  • Making sure you all have a voice in how we evolve Particle products and tools.

I’ll be active online, but you can also expect to see me at conferences, events and hackerspaces in your neck of the woods, as well. :smiley: If you ever have a question or feedback, or just need to vent, you can PM me here, or hit me up on Twitter @BrandonSatrom.

I look forward to working with you all!

Brandon Satrom

24 Likes
2

@bsatrom, welcome and thanks for introducing yourself. I have been developing products based on Photon for the last 2 years. From my experience, the community has been a great resource and was one of the key attractions of the Particle Platform. I for one would like to see more of the solutions and examples of applications from the community posts consolidated back into the reference documents. These are my starting point when doing something new but often only contain a very brief explanation of a function. If I hit a problem then I search the community posts and then may need to create a new topic. The Elites do a fantastic job responding.

Lastly, not sure where you are based or able to travel to but would love to extend an invite to you to present at the Thames Valley IoT Meetup, Reading UK in the near future.

5 Likes
3

Thanks @armor, I appreciate the welcome and thank you for sharing that feedback. That’s definitely in line with how we want to evolve and expand our docs!

And thanks for the invite! I’d love to find a way to get over to your meetup. Let’s connect via PM and see what we can make happen!

1 Like
4
5

Welcome to the community Brandon. I will touch base on Twitter. (@rocksetta)

I teach Robotics (as well as Coding, Animation and 3D Printing) at a High School in BC, Canada (Seriously the best job ever :slight_smile: ). My entire curriculum uses the Particle Photon and I just ordered 30 Mesh Devices. Here is my Robotics curriculum playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOPonnhGOUg&list=PL57Dnr1H_egsL0r4RXPA4PY2yZhOJk5Nr

One student this semester finished the entire curriculum in a week taking equipment home daily. He now is working on his own projects during class!

The supporting Github for the site is at

5 Likes
6

Congrats! Hope this new venture of yours is a great one.

2 Likes
7

Awesome! Thank you :slight_smile:

2 Likes
8

Hi Jeremy, thanks for the reply. This is awesome! I subscribed to your channel and saved the playlist and will check all this out! Great to meet you and I look forward to working with you!

1 Like
9

Welcome. By way of background I am a retired scientist working with my son to develop a medical data logger for use by Cystic Fibrosis patients in a Research environment. This application is a little out of the normal for Particle devices (modest data rate 250 Hz for 20 minutes twice per day). My background is also unusual - a Fortran programmer from the 80’s with no training in modern programming techniques. A steep learning curve that has been assisted by advice from others on the community board.

What would be useful is application notes developed on specific topics. I am currently working on DMA-based acquisition of adc data and FTP/HTTP transfer of files. In both cases I have pointers developed by community members but it would be very handy to have these fleshed out in terms of explanation. Others have expressed interest in both topics and I am sure there are other topics of interest to users that could benefit from the same treatment.

1 Like
10

Thanks Bruce, for the welcome and this feedback! We’re definitely looking at ways to make use cases like yours and others easy to find and easy to create when new ones pop up.

11

Hey Brandon
Great to hear that you’ve joined Particle! Looking forward to working with you to showcase Particle and Watson IoT projects. Let’s build some industry useful examples together. Node-RED can open up another developer community to Particle.

Recently built a Particle Electron based IoT Asset Tracker with Blockchain

John Walicki - Watson IoT Developer Advocate

1 Like
12

Hi John, thanks! And that sounds great! I’m a big fan of Node-RED and have used it quite a bit for home automation stuff. And thanks for the link, I’ll check it out!

13

Hey Brandon! Welcome aboard! I’m a Senior SRE for LendingTree.com during the day and mad scientist type at night, seriously, my job isn’t creative enough, so I do stuff outside of the office to satisfy that urge - or as Sarah Cooper so clearly explained, we play to innovate, innovate to succeed, succeed to play, it’s a vicious fun cycle. I’m sure you’ve heard of Dan Thyer of Logical Advantage, he runs Charlotte IOT here in charlotte, nc, so next time your out this way, be great to get you to our meetup, I’m on the board with Dan, lots of fun.

And for some fun, check out my library, Alexa Home Automation Integration in 6 lines of code: https://github.com/JeremyProffitt/EchoPhotonBridge

Looking forward to the new Feather based boards as well! Glad you’re aboard!

14

Thanks Jeremy! Me too!

That Alexa bridge project looks awesome, I’ll check it out! I actually created an Alexa skill that interfaces with Particle devices during my interview process and was planning to get that cleaned up and published in the next few weeks.

Brandon

15

Yes, please do - and please don’t forget to make it available for other languages too.
Since this doesn’t seem to get addressed
https://github.com/JeremyProffitt/EchoPhotonBridge/issues/4

1 Like
16

I hear you @ScruffR too many things to do, not enough time.

@Brandon - mine is an alexa home automation skill, now days with the ask cli, and the new alexa code generator, it’s dead easy to roll your own alexa skill. I didn’t use it for Lendingtree’s skill I wrote, but I did use their alexa-sdk which is the basis for their code generator, cool stuff actually.

2 Likes
17

@AlbertZeroK, I took a look at your Alexa home automation skill. I really like to get it up and working. The particle community library and the photon code all went fine. I was then disappointed to find that I could not access the skill to load on my Echo Dot - I am in the UK. If you get a moment could you make it available on EU (Ireland) which is the centre that supports Alexa skills for UK. Thanks

1 Like
18

I’m looking to hire a Particle developer to modify the “controlRelay” function the IFTTT uses.

I would like to modify the moment function to turn the relay on for longer (I’d like three full seconds). Or even create a new function which did this.

Where do I go to find/hire a particle developer?

19

Hi @obospieler, feel free to post a public message on a new thread here. There are lots of devs in the community who would be interested in helping out.

Brandon

2 Likes
20

What exactly is it that you’d like to have changed? Have you got some code for us to take a look at? Maybe we can point you in the right direction.