
Christopher Biggs
Director
Accelerando Consulting
location_on Australia
Member since 3 years
Christopher Biggs
Specialises In
Christopher Biggs has been into Open Systems since the early 90s and was there at the birth of Linux and 386BSD. His interest in electronics and connected devices goes back even further. He has worked as a developer, System Architect and Engineering Manager.
Christopher is now the principal of Accelerando Consulting, a boutique consultancy specialising in Internet of Things (IoT), DevOps mentorship and Cloud Data. Accelerando helps businesses get the most from their technology and tools, and creates custom solutions to meet clients’ unique needs. Christopher is also convenor of the Brisbane Internet of Things interest group, and was a founding executive member of HUMBUG, the Brisbane open systems user group. He has presented at conferences and user groups around Australia and internationally.
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The Internet Of Scary Things – Guidance for Developing and Deploying IoT Products
50 Mins
Talk
Intermediate
The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently been somewhat of a laughing stock, with poorly designed and managed IoT devices being associated with severe privacy leaks, theft of service, and botnet-perpetrated denial-of-service attacks. The currently circulating joke goes “The S in IoT stands for Security!”
This presentation covers how to recognise and avoid risks to your business from adopting IoT, some best practices for selecting and deploying IoT devices, and most importantly, for developers of IoT products, how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, through good architecture, quality processes and use of the right tools and frameworks. I will talk about ways to ensure that less-secure or rogue devices cannot damage your network or the Internet at large, how to monitor and control your IoT devices to keep them safe and functional, and how to choose among the growing collection of incompatible frameworks for IoT systems.
IoT is the Wild West – Criminals have outrun the Law, but the Law, and good development practices, are catching up. My presentation will teach you about the guidelines, traps, tools and frameworks that you need to know about to avoid becoming the next “IoT is…” joke.
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IoT for Slackers – Build Connected Devices with NodeMCU
30 Mins
Talk
Intermediate
Learn how to integrate connected devices into your business systems. Slack is a messaging platform with a robust add-on ecosystem, and supports both channel-based communications and direct messaging. NodeMCU is a Lua-based reactive programming environment (inspired by NodeJS) for the popular Espressif ESP8266 WiFi-enabled micro controller. This presentation will introduce each of the tools and then present several examples of using the NodeMCU IoT platform and Slack’s third party hooks to have physical computing devices communicate with humans via your Slack chat channels. The examples are contrived for simplicity, but have been developed in response to needs of an actual office environment.
You will learn what is possible with incredibly inexpensive IoT devices, what hardware you will need to get started, and how to configure Slack to permit interoperation with your device(s).
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Rapid Web productivity in Elm - Single Page Apps and more
30 Mins
Talk
Beginner
Elm is a functional language for the web that compiles to Javascript. As you would expect with any zero-dot version, the language is still settling done, and with
almost a year since the previous release there are a lot of changes, and many breaking ones. But one of the clear benefits of functional programming is ease of refactoring, so
Elm19 promises that most of the changes can be automatically applied to your program.
The notable new features in Elm19 are
- support for single-page apps and other explicit web content patterns
- even better (!) friendly compiler messages that guide rather than chide
- faster compilation, and smaller object sizes
- removal of some features like custom infix operators that are deemed more harmful than helpful
This talk will concentrate on how to be immediately productive with single-page apps in Elm, and digress briefly in how to migrate to Elm19 if you have not yet done so.
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The Awful Design of Everyday Things - Rethinking our workplaces and homes in the IoT Age
25 Mins
Talk
Intermediate
Thirty years after its publication, Donald Norman's seminal book "The Design of Everyday Things", which examined how the tiny usability touches in everyday items matter so much, remains relevant and important. In fact, Don just this year wrote that the technology industry badly needs to re-focus on the true meaning of Human Centered Design, observing that despite his decades of advocacy, the same kinds of design flaws continually recur.
We are just a handful of years short of the centenary of the publication of Modern Architecture pioneer Le Corbusier's maxim "A house is a machine to live in", yet our architecture remains stubbornly steam powered.
My position is that we ought step back and critically reexamine the shape and detail of our workplaces and homes, and in particular how we interact with the computer software that is coming to pervade our workplaces, vehicles and even bodies. The great labour saving devices of the 20th century freed us from much physical drudgery, but significant cognitive burden remains. I will examine, in the abstract and concrete, how much cognitive load is imposed on us by our environment; it has been written that a modern human makes approximately 30,000 choices every day.
For example, why are our light switches placed for the convenience of builders, not inhabitants. Why do so many of our labour-saving appliances require us to spend so much time monitoring and pampering them. Wouldn't it be great if your various "intelligent agents" could work thing out among themselves without involving us. How often do you stumble about in the dark fumbling for a light switch. Wouldn't you prefer to discover the failed refrigerator or flooded storeroom before the contents are ruined?
Join me for an imagination of how Living In The Future could truly be better.
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Functional Frontends with Elm
30 Mins
Talk
Intermediate
Functional programmers are lovers of simplicity and order. Developing for the Web has become nothing like either of these. The number of tools and libraries you need to learn seems to multiply without end, and getting them to work together can be a nightmare.
What if there was a language and environment that had no external dependencies, required no complex packaging tools, runs in the web browser, and oh yes, it's purely Functional.
The Elm Architecture (consisting of the Elm functional language, and a way of applying it to web development) aims to allow fast iterative development of beautiful web apps in a functional language. Hundreds of easy-to-install libraries give you
Most elm tutorials stop at the "hello world" level and sweep the complexity of large applications under the carpet. This presentation goes beyond the bare essentials to show you how my team builds real world applications in Elm that incorporate non-elm javascript libraries while still retaining as much of possible of the simplicity, type-safety and ease of refactoring that Elm brings.
Ports are Elm's mechanism for interaction with the non-functional, loosely typed Javascript runtime. I'll show you practical ways to interact with tools such as Amazon Cognito and the Leaflet mapping engine from within your Elm application, keeping the non-functional glue code to the barest minimum.
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DevOps for Dishwashers - Continuous Delivery for the Internet of Things (Invited Speaker)
30 Mins
Talk
Beginner
The Internet of Things is undeniably here. In the last year we have heard tell of of security cameras, dishwashers and even ovens roaming the internet unsupervised. As a consultant and writer about the Internet of Things, I have worked to bring my experience from 20 years in manufacturing and internet security to the IoT world. This presentation will cover the tools and techniques I use to build secure, reliable and rapidly updatable IoT devices. The techniques covered are applicable to both the simplest embedded devices with no general-purpose OS, and more powerful devices running Linux or Windows.
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From Little Things, Big Data Grow - IoT at Scale
30 Mins
Talk
Intermediate
The Internet of Things (IoT) is really about the ubiquity of data, the possibility of humans extending their awareness and reach globally, or further.
IoT frees us from the tedium of physically monitoring or maintaining remote systems, but to be effective we must be able to rely on data being accessible but comprehensible.
This presentation covers three main areas of an IoT big data strategy- The Air Gap - options (from obvious to inventive) for connecting wireless devices to the internet
- Tributaries - designing a scalable architecture for amalgamating IoT data flows into your data lake. Covers recommended API and message-bus architectures.
- Management and visualisation - how to characterise and address IoT devices in ways that scale to continental populations. I will show some examples of large scale installations to which I've contributed and how to cope with information overload.
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Devops For Dishwashers - Bringing Grown-Up Practices to the Internet of Things
45 Mins
Talk
Intermediate
The Internet of Things is undeniably here. In the last year we have heard tell of of security cameras, dishwashers and even ovens roaming the internet unsupervised.
As a consultant and writer about the Internet of Things, I have worked to bring my experience from 20 years in manufacturing and internet security to the IoT world. This presentation will cover the tools and techniques I use to build secure, reliable and rapidly updatable IoT devices.
The techniques covered are applicable to both the simplest embedded devices with no general-purpose OS, and more powerful devices running Linux or Windows. -
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