Part 1

Once again I find myself writing to you after many months have passed. Time goes by so quickly.
Many of you might have wondered where I went and what I am up to lately and this post is to give all my readers a quick update as well as to what is coming.

The last few months have been extremely busy and I found myself working a lot a overtime at a particular client trying to get everything done before the deadline – Such is the nature of IT. It is so easy to get caught up in the rat race, but if you are one of the sought after developers it’s easy for clients to want more, and the more you deliver the more is asked. It’s a wonderful feeling but you need to keep a balance and not get lost in the work you do, which I’m unfortunately very good at – getting lost in my work.

I have in the bit of spare time I had worked on a few exciting projects, one of them being a connected vending machine. This project is still on-going, but if I can I will share some of the things I learned especially with the communication between c# and Arduino. I have also started working on a facial recognition smart lock which I will post on YouTube in the coming months.

One of the biggest things coming for me is a personal brand revamp as well as launching my YouTube channel. That’s right, I am launching my YouTube channel officially next months, and I hope that it will be exciting and that I can bring a lot of the cool work I do to YouTube land.
I will focus on training, making gadgets as well as interviews with industry leaders in SA. If anyone want’s to nominate themselves, please drop me a mail or a Tweet.

I have thought a lot about what interests me, and by heart I am a maker. I love building things and solving problems and my YouTube channel will be a way for me to showcase and hopefully inspire young makers to do the same in SA.

Part 2

Now on to the second part of this post which is in response to an article on linked in written by my friend and collogue Rory titled ”Caught up in digital propaganda”

“I had almost forgotten how important it is to not neglect the non-digital experiences as well.

I realized that, even in this digital age, we are still humans. And as human beings, we still perceive the world through our “analog” senses. We are still biologically wired up to see, hear, taste, smell and touch to understand the world and process experiences. With so many companies scrambling to “go digital”, is becoming somewhat of a luxury.” ~ Rory

I found this article most interesting. We as humans are currently so focused on technology, automation and robotics that I think we are forgetting to be human. As Rory stated in the article we need to design our digital transformations around human experiences and not just automating everything but rather using it to enrich the human experience.

This article made me think of the movie WALL-E, especially the scene where all the humans are blobbing in front of the screens chatting, but no one is actually interacting with one another while the robots are going about doing everything including making a mess of things.

I am definitely inspired to change the way I approach my making especially my home automation to try and center it around human experience instead of trying to do everything automatically. Robots are a good things, but humans need to be happy too.

If we all can focus on this and not lose sight of the human experience I think technology in a few years will look much different that what we are currently seeing in sci-fi movies.