Tools of my new trade (or: My sweet, sweet SMARTRAC-assigned gear)

I’m working on my kitchen table because I’ve got people in the house installing a brand new air conditioner. You need one in Florida.

Today marks the end of my first week at SMARTRAC as their Technology and Developer Evangelist. Those of you who follow this blog and my social media feeds probably know that I’ve spent most of this week in Fletcher, North Carolina (it’s just outside Asheville), where SMARTRAC has one of its U.S. offices, as well as one of its RFID tag-manufacturing factories.

Although a lot of my work will be done from my home office in Accordion Bay (a.k.a. Tampa), I traveled to Fletcher for a number of reasons:

• To have some serious face time with Product Manager Jason Rusk and Portfolio Architect Robert van Voorhees and get up to speed on SMARTRAC, the SMART COSMOS IoT platform, and our plans for evangelizing,
• to get a tour of the factory and see how RFID tags are made, from raw materials to finished product,
• and to get my grubby paws on the sweet, sweet, sweeeeeet gear that they assigned to me (pictured above).

I didn’t even know that I was getting assigned anything until I toured the factory on Tuesday morning. Here’s a pretty accurate rendition of my reaction:

In order to help me do my job, I have been assigned the following:

• 2015 15″ MacBook Pro with maxed-out RAM, suitable for coding and creative work
• IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and Adobe Creative Cloud, which will come in extremely handy with the evangelizing (and we’ll add the new version of Camtasia to the mix once it’s released)
• Samsung Galaxy S7 (no, not the exploding one) because I’ll be on the road often
• Jabra Speak 510 speakerphone module because I’ll be on conference calls often
• Graph-ruled hardcover notebooks
• Pens in company colors
• A whole lotta USB keys that you can wear as wristbands
• A pile of NFC and other RFID tags
• SMART COSMOS-branded gummi bears, because why not?
• A SMARTRAC tie in company colors. Those of you who attended Microsoft TechDays Canada’s conferences back during my time there know that I can pull off orange:

Me, circa 2009. And yes, since I was in Canada, I used the Canadian spelling: favourite

It’s a very promising sign that SMARTRAC gives their employees not just the tools they need to get their jobs done, but such very nice versions of those tools. In a world where many businesses see employees only as necessary evils and expenses, it’s heartening to see that there are still companies out there that invest in their people.

What comes next is the reason I was assigned all this stuff: to help customers understand the technology and platform that we’re building, and to help systems integrators and developers make the most of it. I know that what I’m saying sounds all hand-wavey and amorphous right now, but keep an eye on this blog — there’s going to be a lot of very, very interesting new stuff on it over the coming weeks and months!