A Guide to Working with David G. Simmons

• Pronouns: He/Him
• Title: Principal Developer Advocate
• Location: Apex, NC
• Working Hours & Timezone: Roughly 8:00 am - 8:00 pm US Eastern Time. I don't work all of those hours, but that's pretty much when I can be considered available.
• Name Preference: Please, don't call me Dave. I prefer David
• Website: Main Site or the repo for it. PRs welcomed

Non-work

Work accounts for a good portion of my time, of course, but it's not all of who I am.

In the Before Times™ I was a complete nut about going to the gym. I went 5 days a week and was in pretty good shape (I could do 1,000 situps!). Hopefully once we are through this whole thing I can go back.

Work

I'm a Principal Developer Advocate (DR4) at Camunda which is a Business Process Automation company based in Berlin, Germany. I work remotely from my home on North Carolina USA.

I've been working remotely for 15+ years now so if you're looking for tips on how to be effective as a remote worker, I'm happy to talk to you about it!

My day-to-day tasks are mostly typical DevRel tasks:

• Write blog posts
• Repond to community users' questions
• Speak at events (someday, when travel is a thing again)

I'm currently doing a lot of work on tooling. I'm developing some tools to be used internally at Camunda, and in the wider DevRel Community, to automate some of the common DevRel tasks, and to better gather data about our communities and their health. This is an ongoing effort.

Speaking of the "wider DevRel Community," I am also one of the moderators (AKA Benevolent Dictators) for the DevRel Collective. The Devrel Collective is a group of almost 2,000 DevRel professionals on Slack where we talk about ... well, just about everything! I also just completely rebuilt their website using Hugo

My career

I did not take a 'traditional' path into tech. I even wrote a whole thing on it a while back! But I've been in tech now longer than I was ever in anything else, so I guess I'm here to stay at this point.

One of the things about a bunch of my career is that I just happened to be in on some things at the start. Thin Client computing and IoT for example. I've been doing IoT now for more than 15 years (getting closer to 20, actually) and that's something not many people can say.

I'm hoping to somehow bring IoT and Camunda together in some way.

What Does Success Mean to Me?

My Primary goal here is to help people. I call it Being of Service. It's sort of what my entire life is based on: Being of maximum service to others. So being successful means I've helped someone. Or I've helped lots of people. I've made a positive impact on someone's life.

Contacting me:

• Issues: Feel free to file issues here about any project I'm working on, etc.
• Twitter: Reach out any time on twitter about just about anything. DMs are always open too.
• Slack: If you're in one of the many Slack communities I'm in, feel free to reach out there.
• Email: Probably the least-reliable way to get me to respond. :-) But sure, email me if you feel absolutely compelled to.

You can lean on me to…

Here is a short list of things I'm pretty good at and would more than happy to help you with or answer questions about:

• Go the programming language. Turns out I do the vast amount of my development in Go these days, so I'm pretty good at it
• IoT I've been doing this since before it was called IoT, so I have a lot of experience here
• Microcontrollers If you're doing something with Arduino, or pretty much any microcontroller or sensor, chances are i a) have one or more lying around b) have programmed it and c) am happy to share code, examples, or pair with you to get it working
• Submitting CFPs is something I have gotten really good at, and I have sort of a ridiculously high acceptance rate. Maybe it's from years of organizing conferences, or whatever, but I can likely help you write a concise, punchy CFP-response
• Speaking I'm no speaking coach, but I've been coached a lot, so I might be able to help you there too
• DevRel-stuff I've been doing DevRel longer than I've been doing IoT. I don't have all the tools and mechanics that Mary does, but I'm happy to chat with you about style, approach, etc.

If you have a project that needs to me build something, like some sensor hardware, or 3-D print something, I'm all in!

I'm tech-support for my entire family, most of my friends, and a lot of other people. If you're having trouble with Linux or Mac, networking issues, iPhones, etc. I can likely help you solve it. If it's Windows, you're on your own. I only do Windows support for real $$.

Personal Notes: I deal with a couple of issues on an on-going basis which may (or may not) be impacting me at any given time:

• I suffer from chronic pain. Most days this isn't an issue for me as I've been dealing with it for so long but there are some days when it overwhelms me. I can get grumpy, short-tempered, etc. on those days. On a very few days I am completely debilitated by it and will be out.
• I deal with tinnitus all the time. During zoom meetings, etc. this is generally not an issue. But if we ever go back to in-person events please understand that in group situations, especially those that have a high level of background noise -- I likely have great difficulty hearing and understanding what is being said. If ears were treated like any other medical condition I'd ideallly have hearing aids to help me deal with it but they aren't, so I don't.