Life At Cisco

Rolf’s second week during field training @Cisco Lysaker :)

Mailliw Sorensen Grann
March 29, 2017

We continue to get a glimps into Rolf’s 2nd week of field training at Cisco Norway.

Week 2

13.03.17

First day of the second week and we start the day by attending Arne Martin’s bi-weekly meeting with Triple-S. Triple-S is our main partner in the Industrial sector. They are the main distributor of Rockwell automation hardware in Norway, and Cisco are in tight partnership with Rockwell, as a wide range of Rockwell’s product portfolio are OEM’ed Cisco gear.

These bi-weekly meetings are more like sync-ups, it is a great way for us to keep the relationship tight and it gives both parties a good overview of what is happening in the specific vertical. After the meeting was done we got a tour of their offices, we got to see their testing lab and some legacy equipment, which was really cool.

After the meeting we headed back to the office and I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out the IOx SDK. In addition I had a meeting with Anton and Valeria where we further discussed how the project work ahead should look like. As none of us come from a developer background we need to spend time on getting up to speed and getting familiar with the tools and way of doing things. IBM and Cisco’s tutorials are great for that purpose, so the conclusion was that Anton and Valeria worked on them, getting up to speed while I continue on figuring out how the deployment of IBM EAA would look like for the IR829.

14.03.17

Day 7 of my Field Shadowing and I start the day by continuing where I left of yesterday. After a lot of back and forth I am finally able to run the SDK on an Ubuntu VM. It took a while to figure out all the requirements, but luckily it turned out well in the end. Following the tutorials on how to develop PaaS apps on IOx it seems like we need to involve more experienced people in order to figure out the right way of deployment. There are several guides on how to deploy, but none of them address our challenge directly. In other words there might be some insights or connections that I am not able to pick up straight away due to my lack of experience. I have also scheduled a meeting with Jan on Friday where we have some time to talk about CSAP, the plan for the coming months and how the Field Rotation project is going to look like.

On a side note, I am beginning to feel more and more at home at the Lysaker office. More and more faces are becoming familiar and everyone here are very welcoming and nice to be around.

15.03.17

Day 8 and we are rapidly closing in on the end of the Field Shadowing experience. Today I met with Nima, one of the two VSAMs currently doing CSAP in Stockholm, which was nice. We will do the Milestone 2 assessment together which I am very much looking forward to. Other than that me and Arne Martin, with the help of Glenn, one of our colleagues working as a CSE, tried to figure out how we can deploy the IBM EAA in IOx. During the sit down with Glenn, we were able to find a sample IBM Watson application which was part of their Watson EAA SDK. This application uses mock weather data to simulate input to the edge and from there you can decide what Watson will do with it.

The application is written in Java and we need to find out how we can deploy it in IOx. We continued working on the project and unfortunately today was the last day with Arne Martin for now as he is not coming to the office on Thursday and Friday.

A huge thanks goes out to him for letting me shadow him the last two weeks. It was a very fun and educational experience. I learned and experienced a whole lot of things that could not be learned from a book. We got along very well and I feel we worked great together as a team on the IBM project. We will keep the engagement going when I get back to Amsterdam, it will then be even easier to engage Anton and Valeria and I am looking forward to seeing the progress ahead.

16.03.17

Thursday was a relatively calm day in the office. I spent most of my time tinkering with the IOx sandbox to see if I could deploy the sample app. It seems like the format it is in now is not accepted by the Fog Director or Local Manager. After some further research it looks like we will have to package the application in a form that IOx will accept. This can be done via the IOxclient, but when we package we need a couple of additional files like the package descriptor. Most of my day was spent trying to figure this out.

Towards the end of the day we were not much wiser regarding the matter so it is time to reach out to people who might know more. Valeria was able to find a very interesting slide deck regarding the implementation of EAA in IOx, but there were no practical steps mentioned. So we decided to reach out to the presenter and see if we can make further progress from there.

17.03.17

Friday, it is almost weekend and it is the last day of my Field Shadowing experience. Today I had 1:1 meeting with Jan where we sat down and talked about the last two weeks, the project and I also got a chance to present CSAP and myself more in-depth. During the meeting Jan presented his plans for the Field Rotation project (8 weeks) and it seems like we are doing a pivot from the SAS project to something even more exciting related to IOx, more info on this will come as soon as the scope of the project has been defined!

Since we roughly had an hour I also grabbed the opportunity to get to know Jan’s background and journey. I knew that we got our degrees from the same university, but other than that I didn’t have too much insight so it was nice to get to know more.

Today was also the day I got a tour of the Lysaker office with Marc Davies from IT. It was interesting because I now know way more about networking compared to when I did my internships. Following are a couple of photos and with that I would like to wrap up the 2 weeks of field shadowing.