July 2022

By Jim White, outgoing EdgeX Foundary TSC Chair

Each year since its founding, EdgeX Foundry awards at least four members of its contributing community with Contribution and Innovation awards.  On this fifth anniversary of the project’s founding, we honored seven distinguished engineers for their efforts on the project.

Innovation Award

Presented to individuals who have provided the most innovative solution to the open-source project over the past year

Byron Nevis and Jim Wang (both from Intel) designed and implemented the new “Delayed Start Services” security capability which is an innovative way to handle providing security tokens to services that start after the EdgeX security framework has started and already handed out tokens to all the known services.  Bryon and Jim have led most EdgeX security efforts over the past two years.  But this year, they provided some real innovation around securely storing secrets, distributing secrets, and making secrets available to other services.  Their innovation will allow adopters to add new device services and application services to EdgeX over time and as use cases demand without requiring a restart of the system.

Anthony Casagrande and Marc Fuller (both from Intel) have been instrumental in Intel’s use of EdgeX to show how it can be a platform in support of retail edge use cases.  Anthony/Marc’s work has provided both a device service and an application service to ingest and use RFID information via the LLRP (Low Level Reader Protocol) which is used in bar code reading equipment found in many retail store locations.  In addition to their inventions of these ingesting and using services, Anthony and Marc have found (and in some cases fixed) a number of bugs and have identified many needed features (submitting more than 25 Github issues) that real world adopters of the platform need.

Emilo Reyes (again from Intel – there seems to be a theme here!) has been a contributor to the EdgeX DevOps team for the last few years and has been a vital part of making the EdgeX community a better, more streamlined community. Emilio has passion for quality and with his experience around unit testing, has contributed hundreds of tests for our Jenkins global pipeline libraries providing us continuous confidence in our ability to deliver quality code. Emilio also has a passion for automation and has been a driving force behind much of our GitHub automation for EdgeX.   For instance, he created automated management of GitHub labels and milestones from a central repository, greatly reducing the number of repetitive tasks needed to manage labels/milestones across 20+ repositories. 

Contribution Award

Recognizes individuals who have contributed leadership and helped EdgeX Foundry advance and continue momentum in the past year.

Iain Anderson (from IOTech Systems) – has been a solid contributor, working group leader, and architect/thought leader since the founding of EdgeX in 2017.  As Device Service chairman, he has overseen several releases (major and minor) and is currently responsible for 11 active EdgeX device services and helping to usher in 4 more that are in active development.  He is the project’s first and foremost authority in C development and personally handles most of the C device service and SDK development.  Iain has over 530 commits to the project (almost 50K lines of code) which puts him #6 all time on the project.  He is also #7 in all time Pull Request submissions for the project.  He is a quiet, steadfast, never-a-complaint contributor that has championed many of the project’s advances such as device service and device profile simplifications, message bus communications from device services, device filtering, and future device service record and replay features.

Siggi Skulason (from Canonical) – updated and significantly improved the EdgeX CLI tool over the course of the last two release cycles.  Importantly, Siggi upgraded the tool from the V1 APIs to the V2 APIs, added support for all the service endpoints (versus a small subset selection of APIs), made the CLI available as a snap, removed a significant amount of technical debt, and improved the products help and documentation.  

I am happy to honor and call out these gentlemen for their efforts.  I don’t know of too many open-source projects that go to honor and thank its contributors with awards like this.  To be nominated and then selected by your peers – especially of the caliber of the EdgeX engineering community – is such a great recognition of their work.  Congratulations Bryon, Jim, Anthony, Marc, Emilo, Iain and Siggi.  Jobs well done.

You can view the Awards presentation here:

Thank You EdgeX

It’s been a productive few months – one release out, another planned and being worked on, and a time to shell out some well earned “kudos”.  Before I go, I want to let the community know  I am stepping aside from my role as TSC chair, and a new set of leaders are stepping up to take EdgeX into its future – and a bright future it has.

About a month after I joined Dell Technologies in 2015, I was handed the task of finding an IoT software platform to put on our new brand of gateways.  EdgeX began life on my kitchen island with an idea, an architecture and a small bit of code.  With the support of the company, some great leaders, and a collection of some of the brightest engineers I have ever worked with, my work was expanded on, productized and launched as the edge software you know today.  For the past seven years (almost to the day), EdgeX has been at the center of my professional working life (and my wife would probably add that it included much of my personal life).  Creating it, taking it into open source, working with the Linux Foundation to make it available and known, working at IOTech to commercialize the idea, and leading this wonderful community has been the highlight of my career.  It has allowed me to travel the world, meet so many amazing people, be a part of an incredible creative process, and watch something I started get used to create solutions that help people all over the globe.  EdgeX has exceeded even my wildest dreams.  It’s just hard to wrap my brain around it even today.  I am no Einstein.  But if you have an idea (even a moderately good idea), find some amazing people around you that can help turn the idea into reality, and you can catch lightning in a bottle.

I would need a separate blog post to thank everyone I owe for this experience and the success of EdgeX.  That is not an exaggeration.  “Thank you” is not enough but to the EdgeX community, people I worked with at Dell and those in my current home of IOTech Systems, I hope you take it as a small down payment for all I owe you.

I’ll close by suggesting that if anyone ever offers you the chance to work on, let alone start, an open-source project – jump at the opportunity.  You will be better for the experience.  I’ll paraphrase Winston Churchill – many forms of software development have been tried and will be tried in this world.  No one pretends that open-source development is perfect or all-wise.  Indeed, it has been said that open-source development is the worst form of software development except for all other forms that have been tried.  

EdgeX – small at the edge, but forever big in my heart.