O brave new world,
That has such people in't.
Application performance monitoring outfit Dynatrace is getting into the flying saucer business. The company today unveiled a UFO – actually a UFO-shaped lamp – that dangles from your ceiling. The idea is that it will help software development teams to “visualize pipeline health” by flashing its 36 LEDs in different colours and …
But seriously - it's only there to send the operations team scurrying to the monitoring system (which frankly should already be up on screen - preferably a big one)...
So I reckon a single light would do the job at least as well...
Just trying to work out how many times the beacon would have turned *off* at some places I've worked...
The scene in "The IT Crowd" where Richmond the server minder confides he has no idea what the flashing lights on the thing mean. Is that good? Is it supposed to do it?
In the grand old days of computing, your IT staff would program the hard drive lights to display a Christmas tree shape, or rev the drives to play popular songs of the time. Giving them a shiny toy that doesn't actually matter if they play with it seems an excellent idea.
Sequences of lights can be very useful in this context, I remember getting one of the first 386 based iPSCs (Intel's hypercube - eventually updated to 486s - wow) and many of our tools were very primitive although we got better at home,e development with time. . The lights on the front pane;ts were extremely useful for debugging and performance hints.
Seems a bit steep for a Raspberry Pi + LEDs. FWIW, it looks like a nice implementation of the idea, but it's questionable how useful the idea really is, especially at this sort of price. I'd imagine it should be more like a 'seems fun, give it a go' sort of price.
I've often wondered if instead everyone needs RGB fairy lights around their monitors, and if you're the one that broke the build, yours go red. You could integrate stink sensors to shame the one that dealt the deadly blow too. You could go further and nominate someone to do the tea round using the same mechanism. When it comes around to annual reviews your boss could announce the amount of bonus you got by colour changes. The list goes on...