Dave Hocking

Hey, everybody. So I'm here to talk to you about how IoT upsets small children, but actually it's more a case about how I've wrestled with my instant gratification monkey and had to set the panic monster on him.

So this comes from the TED Talk about managing your procrastination, and everyone has this rational decision-maker who wants to get stuff done, and this monkey just wants to have fun. The panic monster can get in the way and scare him up the tree so you can get on with getting things.

This is me. Okay, so that's me and my son. We both love Lego, and this is also a lesson in what not to search for on the internet. Turns out that "I love Lego" is deemed censurable by the organizers.

Okay, so... Oh, man, you've messed my slides up.

Okay, so I was given the challenge to do a presentation on IoT at one of our company events. I decided to go for it and then thought afterwards, "Maybe that wasn't the best idea. I don't really work in IoT, and I don't do DevOps." So anyway, I decided it was a good idea. I get some Lego. I get started.

I've always wanted some Mindstorms kit, and so the human and the monkey are both happy right now. Okay, so the monkey's getting to play with stuff. The human's thinking, "You know what? I think I've got control of my monkey."

So this is some of the work I've done. I've built some early concepts, started to play with some ideas. Everyone's happy, right? The monkey's playing. The human's thinking, "I've got control. This is all good. What's not to worry about?" So everyone's happy right now. Human's proud. Monkey's playing along. Everything is great.

I've worked out, okay, I'm going to build some kind of smart factory concept. I'm going to do some quality assurance. I'm going to shrink it all down. Everything's going to be great.

So I order some kit. The kit comes over the internet, and then my son finds out, "That's not your Lego. This is Daddy's Lego." I'm not a bad dad, honestly. So move over, son. This is Daddy's Lego. Let me get started with the builds.

So at this point, the monkey's lived the dream, and the human starts to think, "This is too easy. It cannot be this easy to control that monkey." Start to think about what you're actually going to do. What are you going to show? How are you going to demonstrate it? Where's the logic going to go? Oh, my word, this is more of a challenge than I thought it was going to be.

So I start to work out, where's the logic going to go? How am I going to control this thing? Where's our unique selling point? Obviously, I'm an SE, right? So I've got to do the whole sales thing. Oh, my God, I've got one week to learn Python. Holy s**t.

So at this point, the panic monster comes out. The monkey runs up the tree. The human takes control. Okay, calm down. You're going to be all right. We're going to get this done.

So I start to learn something called EV3 Python. That works okay on the Lego kit. Everything's going okay. I had to eat a lot of M&Ms. I had to work out. The peanut ones were not good. Too many different sizes. Biscuit for the win.

So, this is the finished model. Okay, so it actually works. It sorts out the green and blue M&Ms onto one side, and everything else is bad. Okay, green and blue, Nutanix colors. Woo-hoo.

So at this point, I'm feeling really good about myself. I've got the model that works, and this is the stage I'm going to. No need to panic, right? Okay, this is the biggest audience I've ever presented to before. What could possibly go wrong? I've tested the model out. Everything's working before everyone comes in the room. It's going to be fine.

And then 350 techies turn up with Wi-Fi devices and destroy the network. So at this point, legitimately, this is a network problem, right? We've all had those.

I managed to realize while I'm doing the presentation, this is a network problem, and I get over it. And I've generated enough interest that the DevOps team actually come to me and say, "Guys, you've done a great thing here. Let's take this over to California to our flagship event at .NEXT. Let's replace that Lego thing with a Raspberry Pi, and let's get off the Wi-Fi."

And at this point, I get some help from one of my French DevOps colleagues. We stick a Raspberry Pi in there. We switch out the color sensor for a camera, and we get some artificial intelligence running in there to actually work out what color M&M we've got coming off the belt there.

There he is, a guy called Christophe. He's done a great job. Actually had to swap the M&Ms for marbles because of melting issues.

So even though it says on there, I've built this M&M machine, actually it was a marble machine, but it worked. It brought people over to the stand, and I felt pretty good about it.

So this is the finished model. The guy's written a user interface. You can control the model. You can see what's coming off the stream, and I'm feeling pretty good about this at this stage.

There's only one thing I need to fix, all right? I need to give the Lego to the boy. So I did that, and he was a happy bunny. So in the end, no small children were actually upset by this. Thank you very much.