It’s now four days since thingmonk and I’m still recovering. It’s the developer event for IoT in Europe and it really brings together a lot of people from the community. For two days that means “work hard, play hard”, with 25 or so speakers sharing their knowledge and opinions in short bursts of 20 minutes, with regular breaks for people to meet and socialise over splendid food, coffee and beer.
I must have emitted some 100 tweets from thingmonk and it’s nearly impossible to come up with a reasonable coherent summary of the event. I start with a personal perspective: I’m very community-minded and although IoT started out as a hobby for me, it’s become a job and I’m really glad I do it for both the money and the inspiration I’m getting from generally nice people – I’m not talking the business side of IoT, but the doers and makers who fight battles in the trenches of tech everyday. That includes thingmonk speakers as well as the audience. There was more than one “Oh, you’re THE $twitterhandle” during the conference.
Also, thingmonk is small enough so you actually get to speak to the presenters. We all know evil corporates that are now beginning to consume the IoT, but once you meet folks like Kyle Roche you see that even the dark tower that is Amazon AWS is just run by normal people.
While I’m writing this I realise: This is not going to turn into a summary of talks. Wait until the videos are going to come out, then you can hear Yodit Stanton, Matt Biddulph, Tom Raftery or even myself talk.
Thingmonk is all about the people.
Maybe the entire Internet of Things is, as probably best pitched by Joanna Montgomery who presented her heartbeat transmitting bed-ware Pillow Talk.