Month: September 2021

Timestamp: 9/11/2021 1 hour:

explored the IoT architecture, Cloud platform options, and hardware solutions.

• http://hubbins.github.io/post/sensor-part1/
• https://opensource.com/article/21/7/temperature-sensors-pi
• https://www.circuitbasics.com/raspberry-pi-ds18b20-temperature-sensor-tutorial/
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/reference-architectures/iot
• https://www.adafruit.com/shopping_cart

Project: Our house was built in the 80s, air circulation is not good in the house, temperature between the first and second floor can vary greatly during summer and winter. My husband decided to build an Internet of Things (IoT) application to improve air circulation in the house during his sabbatical leave. He invited me to participate in the project as a product manager.

Date & Time & Location: 09/06/2021; 21:00–21:30; Room Luoyang (in our house)

Attendees: Technical Manager & Software Engineer – Fabius; Product Manager – Lela

Stakeholder: Scarlett (She missed to attend the meeting because she already went to bed)

Notes:

1. Discussed pain points:
   • The second floor gets very hot during the summer, and it gets very cold in the winter.
   • The air circulator fan in the basement is very loud and the noise is especially annoying during evenings.
2. Determined project scope: We decided to solve the first problem in the Minimum Variable Product(MVP) version and leave the second problem for day 2.
3. Brainstormed product names and landed on: AirCares (this may change if we may think of better names later)

Follow-ups:

No.	Task	Responsible
1	Conduct technical research and come up with high-level technical solution	Fabius
2	Determine resources including development team and procurement plan	Fabius
3	Provide high-level estimate	Fabius
4	Create product roadmap	Lela
5	Create user stories	Lela

This is no news – the pandemic is impacting everyone now. My problem is, it has been the 4th year since my last time visiting families in Asia because all previous travel plans were interrupted by all kinds of reasons.

Every four years, Morningstar provides a generous fully paid six weeks sabbatical to its employee. I was about to spend my six weeks sabbatical back in Asia but now it seems unreachable. So I decided to spend the six weeks in the US. Travel domestically? I hope I won’t be the one help spreading the virus.

So finally I choose to stay home for my personal projects:

1. An engineering project: I’d like to complete a small engineering project. I want to ensure I won’t be bored while coding is entertainment to me. The other reason is, I hope this small project can provide insights and reminders to my second project.

2. A summary project: I started my career journey 13 years ago. I worked on a lot of projects, enjoyed various tech stacks, pursued open-minded leadership, experienced innovation from waterfall to agile and on-premise to cloud. But I was always busy, either for work or for my family. Though I do summaries and exchange ideas with my wife (she works in the software product management domain) periodically, I’ve never gotten a chance to aggregate those ideas, approaches, lessons, and opinions with a dedicated time. It’s time.

For the engineering project, I prefer to do something I am not so familiar with, like IoT, but I didn’t find a real fun and useful project yet. While I was using Excel to manage the cashflow of my family, I plan to create a simple tool to help me, and probably other folks who think it’s overkill to hire a financial advisors. If you have any ideas about small projects, it’s not too late yet and I would appreciate it!

For the summary project, I’ve started the agenda of the summary. I was a bit surprised that I listed so many worked items to build a modern software. Each item could be a real big topic, let me choose a few priorities to start my record.

https://fabiuslela.com/static/summary.html