Every Seat at the Ignition Table

0:00eventually become an ignition expert in their company get the whole company to adopt didn't start to spread it across multiple sites because they were able to go from You know installing this tool for free Getting some free support from inductive automation Getting to talk to me for a bit and then getting them just the ball rolling with inductive University with some examples in their project Hello and welcome to Unplugged an IOT podcast where we dive into the fascinating world of industrial internet things and automation. I'm your host Phil Saboa Can I fill in hello everybody my name's eight Fuentes Phil we're talking about one of our favorite software packages today Before we jump into today's episode a quick thanks to our sponsor Sirus link solutions They connect IT and OT with MQTT and Spark plug check them out at Sirus link dot com Thanks also to Canary Labs the leading time series data platform for industrial operations

1:06Collect store and visualize your operational data with ease Visit Canary Labs dot com Probably you and I have definitely had a history in this product and not just one of them a product point of view But why how it solves problems and the journey we love to know is how people take something Like the product and then solve problems with it What was the journey to make that happen and today we have a very special guest Carl van Inanem is an ignition software engineer currently with BW design group So we're looking really forward this episode to understand that that journey of knowing and mastering all taking advantage of our product And help source problems Yeah, Kyle does something most engineers You know only talk about so he's he's done many presentations on the history of automation and CICD pipeline so we're gonna really dig into that later on in the episode So hold on just for that, you know some real technical deep dive there Kyle It's really great to have you

2:07Thanks Phil thanks it's great to be here Always been a big fan of the podcast since it started and overall the communication towards the industry That's great car something with always starts off is that like in in our ecosystem recognition What does each role like that we think about ignition itself ecosystem? What what do the things that I suppose want to try to find out? It's what's the ecosystem map reply for ignition? How do you see it because it's a product but it can't pay many areas What does it look like for you? You've seen the product started with something where did it go from there? Yeah, so just a quick bit about myself right I started that ductive automation as many of us have NISCO and I worked for their support and their training team now I'm a software engineer using ignition A lot of my exposure to it immediately was of course on that inductive automation support team where people using ignition from all You know every industry all all walks of positions are potentially calling in for help or guidance And that's where I started to really learn how kind of what you're hinting at it to the what you might say the breakdown or the the makeup of the industry

3:12other ignition users really is and That's something I kind of want to talk about because for a new person coming into the industry It's not always clear and maybe depending on what company you start with All of the players and the partners who you're gonna end up working with They might not show themselves right away and you might end up being surprised like oh wait It's not just ignition right there's there's a lot of perhaps they'd party modules or so kind of supplemental tools We add on to our ignition systems so when I Talk about Ignition at a high level and I talk about kind of who's involved in the roles we see I almost break down at the highest level the orgs into four buckets So I guess before we even get to who's involved I want to kind of talk about how I've seen The industry shaping into these these four Buckets and this is mainly from a point of view of someone who is maybe new to the industry trying to figure out like where do I land? People have been talking about ignition right you learn ignition

4:12Get a job or you get a promotion right because you can now use ignition But where do you actually do that where where the role is you know? What are those people look like what I've seen is it really goes into these four buckets of one the one we're expecting of course the integrator Integrators are like the company I work for now where you're going to be deploying ignition typically for some sort of client who is looking to Automate of Actory or a field of devices Integrators come in all shapes and sizes they're probably the most complex of the bunch and so it's hard to just say that there's just one Catch all to describe integrators, but they are ultimately You know one big bucket probably the next big bucket is of course the end user There are plenty of people and support gets a lot of these calls at inductive automation Who are working for the literal end users the factories that are deploying the applications for Whatever automation is gay to hmi system they need Perhaps it's mms perhaps it's

5:13Something simpler right or maybe more complex to other people's eyes But it could not even touch tags at all sometimes we're automating things Purely from a database perspective purely from users interacting with the UI and hmi perspective so those are probably two of our biggest buckets of Jobs and roles in the ignition world you have your people likely your skate engineers your ignition engineers your controls engineers at both integrators and end users The size of those companies is going to kind of dictate a lot about what those roles are going to look like So as people called into support right if you had a really big integrator Those are likely a bit more specialized people are like they were a hmi focus or a skater focus or controls focus Whereas if it was a small integrator with a bit less staff and less resources people are a lot more hats So the roles although they might sound the same million Skate engineer ignition engineer The actual you know company or at the size of it. Maybe the supporting staff you have is really going to dictate like who those people are and what they're

6:17Gonna be able to talk about when they're say calling into support or developing your project But then what are the last two buckets? Those are also probably pretty clear once you get into the industry one is just big consulting Integrators and consulting are kind of the same But there is almost like a different beast of companies the more kind of classic technology consultants like the big the big four consultants It's a category the international consultancy companies And they also are out there doing a lot of ignition work looking and hiring ignition experts their roles might be Listed a bit differently just because you know they have like maybe Like they call their people experts or whatever so they're they have ignition experts. They're hiring instead of Ignitions offer engineer and those are going to be typically You know if they're the big Consultancy companies maybe dealing with the bigger enterprises that are just like They're just skipping over the integrator local integrated because they're just massive and they already have it a deal with this big Consultancy company all three of those are the people who are ultimately the ones deploying ignition and

7:21Developing with ignition and they're all gonna be coming with different needs And supporting people, but they're all using that ignition resource And then there's that kind of final fourth special one which is The ignition group itself inductive and the supporting companies around it which is actually much bigger than it seems right because there's a lot of companies You know maybe a sepus off serious link who Work on tools that massively support the ignition ecosystem and are in them in Of themselves pretty large, you know products that people rely on for many things And then that branches out even farther to tools that are unexclusive to ignition but are very heavy in the industry right like Canary is an example So you have that kind of fourth more like You know partner and literal developers of ignition Which is where I started and I think it's a great place to start But you're gonna nest you're gonna not necessarily be working on ignition in the same sense as an ignition integrator If you're in support you may be but if you're literally like a developer at inductive automation like you're as offered developer for ignition

8:27You're not developing ignition projects so Your passion for ignition could take you in many different directions because of these these four kind of pillars of the shape of the industry that you can go towards So long answer it, but that's what I see when I think about Who's using ignition who's who's calling in when I was back in support whom I talking to now a conference What's what's been your favorite role in in that like what's the what's being the highs and Of those different Physicians that you've held That's a hard one. They're all my favorite. I love them all But I mean ultimately I think I have to say training. I was always born to to teach I was a trainer for inductive automation for several years and I taught all of our classes teaching people Ignition is a really fulfilling thing because you know that all these people are gonna go out and take this platform and go out and push you know the performance push the ability of their applications

9:27And ultimately make their end users lives a bit better because we all know Those of us listening to ignition related podcasts and developing with ignition that we typically can make better systems with it than what we were replacing Or having nothing at all in the first place And it makes people's jobs easier. It makes the data stronger and can make businesses better in the long run So it's very fulfilling knowing that not only are these people Well likely by the end of the class having a good time because it is a pretty fun application to design with But also then getting such a beneficial outcome from this You know new learning experience that they're having So teaching ignition is a pretty undeniably fun thing and it's why I started trying to get back to the community where I can with You know trying to participate in the forums, which is also a really great place to learn and Engage what was your aha moment? I suppose in your journey with them when you started and the whole the whole Yeah, when you first started you having a aha moment that you remember Yeah, the aha moment I probably had a few of

10:30Almost each role right is probably had a bit of an aha moment for like why this role has Helped reveal ignition's importance to me I love working with ignition if that is an obvious But one of the coolest things is how Especially when I was doing training and support with inductive you could see as people Learn and ramp up with it that they also kind of get that passion and spread it So I think my first aha moment was in my support role There was a new Wasn't even a new client yet. It was a new engineer who had heard about ignition through You know connections Through conferences and he knew that it was the tool that could help His campaign his processes improve and so he and took the initiative on himself and installed it himself and You know started tinkering with it and he signed up and so the salespeople eventually contacted him right because you put in his email and he was trying it out

11:31And eventually he was you know trying to learn and he called in his support and he didn't really have A super explicit problem other than he just didn't really know How to use it yet for the most effective way for his company And so really what he was calling in for was just a quick guided, you know discussion and that discussion Well, you know if you think about my perspective as someone support I'm dealing with a prehectic queue Didn't seem necessarily like the most Important thing in the world at the time compared to like factories crashing and burning it Then evolved into a long relationship where I saw this person Eventually become an ignition expert in their company get the whole company to adopt it and start to spread it across multiple sites Because they were able to go from you know installing this tool for free Getting some free support from inductive automation Getting to talk to me for a bit and then getting them just the ball rolling with inductive university with some examples in their project

12:31and Then they started to run with it and and made a project showed it to their company and and from their, you know business relationships bond and that person is now, you know able to say that they're in ignition expert when they came in with with nothing so That was my oh, that's a long aha moment But it was probably the second or third call when he comes back and he's like look at all the stuff I've done now Right like now I'm showing people and they want more and more and we start testing things even further and we You know, we messed up with some tags. We should have messed with and we learned some lessons, but we ultimately You know push the limit of what they thought was possible with these types of applications and and change their business for the better So that was my first real aha moment and I'm sure I've had plenty of other sense then in training and such but Kind of seeing that over time like literally several months It's hard to deny that benefit when you've seen it Yeah, yeah, it's definitely a huge kind of leaps that you you take on once you start getting on an understanding of how you can leverage

13:37You know the the platform So it's a really interesting kind of journey How you get those aha moments even from like from end users and from from from from people using the platform and just trying to I guess get to grips with it as well. I guess I want to You know in 2025 you you're doing a presentation in icc on the the history of industrial automation Maybe you can give us the the highlights of of that presentation and maybe take us through what what is the history of industrial automation look like Yeah, that's was a really cool presentation It's on a doctor of automation's website as as are all of their icc's presentations after a certain time They put them up there for free, which is a really awesome resource so shout out to them But yeah, that was really fun presentation to make we When I was at inductive in general like they would call out for if anyone had ideas most for technical right now I kind of wanted just something a little less technical later on in the week Just because acc is long for people to go there right you're learning a lot often

14:39And I wanted something that was still I thought really important and really fun Um, but just simply a little less technical and this was something that I'd always been passionate about it was actually something probably inspired by Listening to you and could say talk Phil More than anyone else, but really like lots of people in the industry hinted at these sort of You know the industrial revolutions and and the importance of those and how they've kind of led us to this moment But I'd never actually seen anyone Break it down at a literal historical perspective of like these are the years Where these technologies and these kind of industrial revolution periods are Or dominating and so that's really what I wanted to focus on and so I broke it down So they just is that you've heard of industrial revolution probably one But really there's one to five six to pending on who you talk to and what exactly you're talking about So just to talk about like those basic four like what are they? Well, there's the one we all know and that happened in 1712-ish

15:42In around England and that's of course, you know the OG industrial revolution mechanization making engine moving onto like the adoption of steam And that's when you have things like You know the spinning Jenny and the cotton gin and all that kind of You know american revolution history and things are starting to get automated And that first and best revolution is usually the only kind of remember of like Things start to get faster with machines human labor is going to be a lot cheaper And we could get into the nuances of each each device, but we don't need to we know from there The next biggest thing that happens is Electrification right it's it's probably over a hundred year I know for facts over a hundred years later So it's a very big jump Compared to these next few jumps we're going to see for the industrial revelations That's the pattern that really the whole presentation is about is that these jumps are getting shorter Electricity came about now all of these you know machines these steam engines That we'd been starting to rely on more and more can be spread anywhere in the world basically because now all you need to do is bring a

16:47Power plant nearby which in itself is hard and it's going to take us you know probably another hundred years to really get this spread out everywhere But it is going to Massively increase the speed and allow us to work at night allow us to work in factories The other thing that I thought was really important at this time and the kind of second industrial revolution is is the birth of modern science fiction we have 20,000 leaks under the sea a jewels verned and and all the subsequent Works of art after that in which artists and people are essentially dreaming and theorizing about what Technology we have now can do in the future and He essentially envisioned electricity before It was a thing envisioned submarines before they were thing in that way and we now see how especially with like The current trend of AI and things like that how you know, maybe a Science fiction that we grew up with like Wally for my generation is starting to be seemed to be more more relevant than ever so

17:47As we get into the electrification and we start to move through We now get to what most people will feel like a very jarring jump into the 19 You know 60s we get to the computerization you're like oh wait a second some people like I was alive then and my dad was alive And you know That wasn't that long ago and you're right because The time between the actual industrial revolution and now it's not that many years It's only a few hundred and now our jumps between industrial revolutions are getting down to 80 to 40 to 20 Years apart So the third industrial revolution around 1965 is when computerization really took off Computers as we know allow us to automate Even harder now not only do we have electricity not only do we have motors we can computerize them and automate them to do Whatever we can imagine that's around when Moore's Law is going to be you know Put out there that we're going to have You know exponential growth of computing power over time and the sci-fi continues to evolve we have dreams of space flight and

18:55Traveling to distant worlds computers start to get us into video games and as we get through computerization We get things like PLC Our industry starts to become born right so our industry came about in the third industrial revolution I think I forget exactly The exact dates, but you know for example 1986 The PLC-5 is going to come out a lot of us are probably still using PLC-5s in somewhere another So during that third industrial revolution right in the middle we're dealing with industry hardware. We still have today Towards the end of it You have the birth of inductive automation You have skater already out for many years with things like iFix And other early predecessors and then you get into the maybe the debatable one People are going to debate about when industry 4.0 the fourth industrial revolution starts right we've gone from Automation engines To electricity to computers what's beyond computers the internet? No, it's not the internet. That was part of the third one

19:56It's kind of taking advantage of the internet and computers and actually utilizing them for our industry for industrialization 2011 Hanover messi is is debatably when you could point to the start of it is that's when The working group there kind of said this is the start of industry 4.0 We are focusing on virtualization automating factories the concepts of things like digital twins Ignition evolving into ignition itself and not just the predecessor products industry 4.0 is In my eyes something that is very much defined by ignition and its related environment So what's perhaps intimidating to the sum is that it was around 2011 It's now been only 15 years and the question is has industry 5.0 started? Have we already moved on to automating the automation? Can we build ignition systems With just a sentence People are going to start to debate at that about that more and more over the next few years and both skeptics and supporters are going to end up on

20:58You know different sides of it over time, but industry 5 is one where I'm not going to try and claim one It started or if it started but it's the one either right around the corner or we're in the middle of Or we're at the end of and maybe it's going faster than we expected But those first were a pretty Firm to define and and that's the history of industry is to where we've gone to now Why does it matter? It's somewhat up to you, but We all know that if you want to know where you're going you have to know where you've been There less of those I guess Lines in the sand in terms of definition and we're getting to move out so quick pace that we're more in the evolution points It's it's nuances right we're talking about Not necessarily leaps and bounds, you know the age of AI is just going to rapidly develop though that Technology to be able to just kind of keep going and running

21:59So many different branches there is pretty amazing. But you should they'd some each of those Industry 01234 whatever they might be bring so much of value That it's exponential as well from previous generations from you mentioned the genes are just here and there with electricity scattered everywhere during Computerization now you pick it or so most though they just bring this in term but tremendous of value And in those in those eras all those journeys right now you mentioned ignition being Healthy and industry 4 You we talked about ignition. We know you love ignition, which is great But everyone's going to start somewhere and I think the journey that you went on Has cemented how you should learn ignition from scratch and shameless plugs here you did Create an article around how to learn from ignition and for those listening I would encourage you to see this article. It's online I unplugged an iot our podcast website you'll see it there But tell us Kyle summarise what is a what's a practical guide for someone like the no ignition experience because

23:02It's no doubt we hearing more and more people want to learn about it But what's from your point of view? What's the practical guide how to get there? Yeah This is the beautiful part about learning ignition right now. It's that it's all free and you can all do it right now If you have access to your to the internet of course, so there are some minor barriers internet access willingness and you know, maybe some desire to learn ignition Uh, but ultimately all those resources that I referenced in that article the how to learn ignition from scratch article They're all free and ready for you to start with Pick up with whenever you have free time do it on your own and that's one thing especially as someone who worked in training that I Highlight because we don't want it to and this is important even the trainers will say that who teach the class Now we don't want it to seem like that's the only way to learn not everyone has the time and the money to go to a training class It's usually the companies you're sending people So I'm not expecting a high schooler or a college student to be able to find you know that a week and money without an employer to go to a training class

24:05We want resources to be available for everyone because ignition adoption You know shouldn't be predicated on some sort of secret class or anything and the stuff you're gonna learn in those classes is Excellent and you get them in five days or less, which is kind of the benefit of it The cool part about learning ignition kind of online is that you can maybe do it in your free time So it's more for the people who are trying to break into it If it's something you already do for your day job try and go to class if you can If you want to learn it on the side that's really what this article was all about because Anyone can do it with the resources we have so how do you get started? Everyone's going to say with inductive university right and doctor of university is The free tutorial library then ductive automation hosts and that is indeed how you're going to get started But you're going to do it in a more nuanced way in that article I'm going to recommend that instead of just like watching every video in order You're actually going to make sure you install ignition and you have a bit of a mission to build something

25:08At that initial intro to inductive university and the designer and that's really the biggest difference between maybe what you You might have heard in the past about learning ignition and what this article recommends is that you have to make sure you're building something along with it Don't just watch all of inductive university And expect it to to give you ignition superpowers That is ultimately a tutorial Reference library that a lot of us go back to and review over and over again to remind us about features We haven't used for some time. It isn't something you get all of the answers from So what do you get all the answers from my opinion is Having the experience to prove anything you need yourself in ignition Do that by building with it the ignition design challenges really what I recommend building around and using inductive university around If you're brand new getting started The ignition design challenges on the inductive automations training website So that's linked in the article. I think it's training dot inductive automation dot com And it is ultimately just a simple outline of a project

26:12fairly accurate to you know, spec you might receive for a real project And which you're going to utilize most of the major features of ignition And a fairly controlled and you know sequenced manner This is going to allow you to kind of dip your toe and one at a time and pick up the different parts of ignition As you're dealing with them instead of just front loading and all at once because I can be very intimidating and also very confusing If you think about it right now for those that understand it ignitions features and systems You have vision and perspective if you just watch all of inductive university You've now watched two visualization modules and you might not even really understand how to go Start with either of them yet because you haven't opened your designer yet if all you've done is watch videos So that's why it's really really important and that's what is stressed in that article to always work along with your designer when you're doing a ductive university If you do the design challenge in a ductive university while walking through it in your designer Then at that point you're kind of ready to go with whatever else you want you could go

27:14Maybe reverse engineer something from the exchange you could continue with that article and the other advanced development projects You could go learn more about specialized Tools that you know you're going to need perhaps containerization perhaps databases It's skies the limit once you get into the designer and you're comfortable moving around ignition Because you have all of this documentation all of these tutorials that can show you where to go from there I totally agree that you need like that drive that's something to that north star to kind of get you going For me it was like a home automation system. So I was just trying to build Out you know Connecting connecting different IOT devices all into ignition via mqt t and and building those out. So yeah, it was a really exciting way of driving my learning forward Got a lot of great resources online Kyle The newsletter you build how do you got there will be more things you'll come across more things you find

28:16Are there other areas you've seen that's where learning can be done even more right now with eight three I think the areas that people And that this is what the article kind of is updated for a three because it's an update for a three But the areas that people are going to need to now kind of dive into even more are like we've been hinting at is of course AI in general What does that mean to you? What does that mean for your industry your role but more specifically for ignition is 8.3 and Continuous integration continue deployment right you don't want to learn what that means CICD if you've never heard of that I would recommend looking that up outside of this learning about that as an abstract concept because it's not unique To the industry enough and that's true with a lot of things to ignition when you're thinking about design best practices and design principles ignition isn't You know, it's the only Skated product on earth it isn't the only hmi on earth And it isn't the only you know software platform that you're developing and providing to a client right so

29:17If anything 8.3 is finally out us to catch up to the more practical beneficial Solutions that IT systems have been deploying when it comes to shipping software And so if you are on 8.3 and you haven't tried it yet That is the thing you need to focus on if you have some experience with ignition already it's seeing how that 8.3 update and evolution has allowed CICD and and essentially tracking your files and get to be even more seamless Impossible so that now we're much closer to you know that kind of more comfortable IT delivery but people who aren't familiar with The history voting systems that might not realize has been eluding us for a long time So 8.3 and CICD managing ignition with Git is really that new Area which isn't necessarily new because you could do before but like it's it's evolved into that ideal Area with a 3 where it's something everyone needs to take advantage of to perform at the best with ignition

30:20What what does Git do for for people out there in the industry that haven't necessarily been Approach it because as you said you know 8.3 is kind of open this up to to ignition So what role does that serve for for 8.3? And it's a really good question Because just because it's there to like you have to use it right so it's one of those things It's almost like the inverse of what we say when we're talking about ignition projects Where if you just gather a bunch of data We don't have any plans or ability to use it It's not going to do much for you right if you just track your ignition development with Git But don't do anything with that you don't put any sort of operations or principles on top of it Yeah, you're you're still going to get the same output So what Git really allows us to do at a high level is it allows you To track at the smallest level what changes are being made To the files of a repository In this case because of how 8.3 is involved that repository can effectively be

31:23Almost your entire ignition system there's technically a few things right that aren't always going to be there like your database might not always be Paired in the same way with your ignition system your empty duty server You know modules But for the things that actually matter the files that you're actually changing in what is considered the literal ignition development It is now all going to be able to be saved and tracked in Git and therefore put in front of you and UIs like GitHub or Git Lab And this is going to allow people to work together and produce and interact Recall and reflect on the changes that have been made with ignition It's no longer just a black box of gateway backups that people are restoring to try and fall back to people in the past and older versions have been able to Manage a fair amount of ignition Project related stuff and Git but this eight three evolution has allowed really the entire ignition gateway and all of the settings that matter for your ignition ecosystem to be managed even better So that's why 8.3 everyone's kind of talked about this this level at moment

32:25Because now you can have it so your entire team is kind of synced on the same page Working together in the same operational way on a software product adding features Just like you might have been trying to do in college if you had took a standard cs degree and we're showing how it get Kind of flow should look like where people Bring their little changes together and you can test all of the changes together and then only when it's ready you can move up Into the final released version So it allows us to overall control our versions a lot better and prevents mistakes from reaching the clients Yeah, it's really an exciting kind of the journey I know from 8.1 Deliveries it's been difficult to manage I guess that pipeline from development Test and production. I guess what tips Do you have for preparing I guess 8.3 Release pipelines that's a good question. All right. It's gonna depend a lot on what you're I guess with the two sides of your your organization your client organizations have available

33:30you need to make sure you're not Throwing them a giant curve ball being like oh, yeah, go set up your you know your Kubernetes pipeline with someone who's never dealt with that before right So before you do anything like talk to whoever you're dealing with and make sure The tech stack the resources you have available are going to be agreed upon so you don't run into You know operational constraints and and disagreements later on once you have that There's gonna be a lot of resources that inductive themselves are gonna be hosting for almost all of this whether you're using Kubernetes Or Docker you're gonna have their resources to help you get started. It really depends. I think on What you've done if you've done literally nothing then you should start with the absolute basics Do it all yourself practice with getting everything spun up locally Working on just your own kind of pseudo practice project You know communication is gonna be key because you don't want to just Develop a whole pipeline on your end that just fails on the other end

34:33So I found that when working with clients It's always gonna have to be likely in a meeting one on like not necessarily one one but talking as opposed to Just you know emails or text chats you we talked about that evolution from eight one eight three the benefits of bring Special gift which you could do with both eight one eight three Version control that's all great you mentioned CICD earlier These are concepts Traditionally Kyle not heard of in the OT area So CICD is been around for a while. We know in IT space and developing. It's been it's been a continuous improvement continuous development As you mentioned just walk us through like what that look like for an ignition project You mentioned that before just get just a detail look about that Yeah, so and I guess in an ideal state You're gonna have more than just your ignition system tracked In a get reaper right? It's not just so you can roll back ideal you never need to roll back right because you never make a mistake How do you get to that scenario where you never make a mistake? Well you set up a whole lot of tests and precautions around

35:38Your development system So your CICD is gonna allow you to I'm speaking mainly from utilizing tools like GitHub But technically maybe the tools you use could vary the terms and the resources you have available But you're gonna be able to set up things that automatically run when you are Trying to for example deliver Maybe to the most important branch that's gonna be released to prod Versus different tools that can run when your local developers are just getting new changes in you're gonna be able to make sure that things like All of your styling and formatting are gonna be clean and consistent which is gonna reduce You know load on the Mines of the people actually auditing and reviewing all of the changes that go into ignition Because that's probably the biggest thing That is going to be a barrier to organizations Starting to employ this procedure is it's now gonna feel like there's a lot more work to ignition development Because now not only is someone doing the thinking and developing

36:39But now there's someone actually literally looking at the output in the file system and now Reverse engineering that thought to make sure it makes sense and it's logical Which and in standard code is is practical and understood but sometimes Ignition stuff isn't as easy to understand as you may expect So certain things are gonna be a bit harder for Your engineers to kind of work through as a team in that sense because certain things are quite difficult to decipher Speaking as an example like very complex like nested expressions Are going to be not easy to read in the literal file format and in get up when you're reviewing So things like that are gonna require organization to think about how can we set up you know Tools steps or resources that maybe augment or Encourage our users to You know when those things come up test or prove them in different ways so that users aren't having to literally like look at something very hard to decipher So the benefit of that CICD system is going to be the operational

37:44Efficiency you can build on top of it Once you get it going and once you get people kind of familiar with it and and you almost have to test it and grow it With your with your team so that they know what's happening. You can't just throw it on top of them And expect it to be perfect Because certain things you might actually have to carve out maybe your customer wants a certain formats in certain ways There has certain rules about how things have to be organized in the designer and how the tags have to be organized and things like that You might have to literally adjust your rules Per client so it's one of those things where you don't want to be A too strict, but you also need them there so you can take advantage like you get the benefit of them in that way It's a very complex operational thing and and get ups in itself is starting to become You know an important sort of skill and roll within the ignition team now You know, I think I think end users also need to upskill there, you know Their internal teams to understand how You know ignition and other platforms integrate into those cicd pipelines

38:49I mean they're doing it maybe from a dba point of view they're doing you know database versioning and they're doing The application versioning potentially, but you know bringing that I guess Skater type operations is kind of new to them as well. So you have to bring them like Once us say a system integrator of deploy is a solution you want to to hand it over You know, that's quite a leap and quite a a big task for an end user to to take on so you have to bring them along the journey As well, so that's that's I guess everyone is learning as it as it goes especially for larger architectures as well where you've got multiple servers or multiple front ends and Those that complexity becomes a bit tricky. How how can I guess Substantiated architectures start bringing it do they start small do they start mapping out everything or how would you how would you advise to tackle those types of situation

39:54It's a good question. I think the inductive ethos if you hear what inductive automation says it's gonna be to try and start small and to try and start to see that value It's it's very difficult to get it like if it's if it's a big embedded system with many teams many heads involved It's gonna be hard to get it all Moved over so it is in that scenario where you're coming in and you're maybe shaking things up and doing it It is gonna be focused on the maybe don't even do it on existing ones It's when the next update comes we're gonna do it on that one right and we're gonna prove the valid it the validity in the Benefit of it Especially with these pipelines when when you're working on maybe from like an integrated perspective with a client I think the most important thing to remember is that it's like it's a two-way relationship and yeah Maybe it's their pipeline and yeah, they're people need to learn a bit more but like you have to help them and it's your pipeline too So it's ours together, right? So that's the biggest thing from the if you're the ignition developer perspective. It's so you can't let that You know if that's the problem this the last point they never get your project, right?

40:59So you can't let that be the thing that breaks anything you want to be contributing and Deerizing solutions for that just as much as you would the ignition app development in isolation isn't gonna isn't gonna benefit the the customer at the end of the day The invention industries For five when they mix a point eight point three significant improvements in technology get CICD we got this interesting facets AI we sort of touched a little bit about it How do CB things merging together? So you had a quick chat before You know typically with code with ignition Created designer build their gateways. What's AI doing to enhance augmented knowledge now? What do you say or what have you experienced nowadays? ignition and AI are Going to go hand in hand it's something where ignition projects in themselves call upon and require so many tools and

42:00areas of expertise That oftentimes the individual developers not going to represent The high level expertise on all of this so you almost need a device team that's going to be able to cover everything the Tools that we're starting to see emerge with modern models are allowing supplemental Kind of support for people who aren't experts but are relatively you know novice or adept at The kind of supporting resources around ignition so I'm imagining like more unique databases Databases that are only used in very specific types of industries or scenarios where these people are coming in and having to build and ignition system On top of the database maybe a no-sequel or something like that that they've never dealt with before And AI is helping close that gap faster giving you access to tools Maybe the docs directly for that database that you're using so you can speed up your harness so that you're Going to be able to check your code for mistake is against that type of stuff that

43:04A new User in that area would make a lot more of faster So at almost a very simple Development point of view the way ignition development requires so many things and so many hats It it simply does speed up developers by giving you access to more tools faster things like mcp servers To be able to just simply scrape the docs of inductive automations ignition docs To allow your models to have those docs available help speed up development That's very good at checking things like are your functions written correctly do your functions use correct parameters That's all directly from the docs you can verify so this is all translating to giving people the ability To ideally work on things that they want to work on and kind of reduce some of the noise Speaking speaking specifically about cicd Things like committing and creating pull requests Kind of managing that more basic documentation A.I. is helping a lot with that a lot of people never it wrote commit messages in the first place and now they're actually

44:06Archonit messages not because they're writing them but because there's finally a tool that can write it effectively and they're okay with those messages They're checking because if they weren't okay, they would get mad about it so It's helping us cut down on some of the maybe more monotony's work and you can focus more on things like architecting Solutions testing At new tools to try and resolve problems that in the past you never even had time to think about because we were working on You know writing those messages and learning the new database tool in the more classic way so The getting on boarded with new projects getting on board with new tools It's starting to change But the speed of how fast you can expect that and then the quality of output itself of ignition product When support of A.I. is is further improving just every day I see The growth of the models Combined with the modern tools we have mcp servers all of the supporting resources they have in A.I. tools

45:11It's getting us to a very good point where ignition development is faster than it used to be Yeah, I think A.I. is like enabling you know the visionaries the engineers You know develop quicker Just because they understand the context a lot more Um, I see the engineers Understanding where they want to get to an A.I. is enabling them to get their quicker Is probably it like they understand the problem They know how to fix it Then they're less inclined to do the Grunt work that's needed in terms of writing every single line of code To get there and so it's it's just becoming more rapid and and speed I guess what What we always ask our our guests is You know, we're all on a learning journey here Where are we? Where in next Are you kind of focusing your attention in your learning journey?

46:14It's for an end for me. I need to learn more about CSS and And hdml right that's the perspective has been out for a while now And I know the the basics of perspective But I personally need to learn the more about Getting to the next level because I found a lot of my recent issues that have been running into my development stem is back down to some simple CSS settings that Once you fix you don't have to deal with anymore So that's my personal area. I know not everyone's in different in design and I'm not personally either But it's just something you got to deal with sometimes because At the end of the day are skater and hmy screens need to show up somewhere And CSS can make them look very very good if you're willing to learn about it a bit I've seen some really excellent front-end engineers both here at design group and inductive and And in the ignition ecosystem and those who know their CSS are the ones making the most beautiful projects So that's at the very bottom of my article is one of the last things to learn because that's the one thing I need to learn One understand what you're talking about Yeah, especially with perspective you're right

47:16Got to always define your terms CSS Castating style sheets is a front-end language for defining styles styles being literally the display of your UI like the colors the text font the highlight so you can have very Dynamic or very static CSS styles that you know maybe change or react to the user doing different things to your application For skater systems you usually don't want anything super fancy But the benefit of it is often having light and dark mode because people love light and dark mode and being able to have it be responsive in that way being able to be responsive in terms of different screen sizes as well That's also combines a bit with html5 they kind of go hand in hand but Ignitions perspective visualization system is built on those tools. So learning those settings CSS Helps you a lot and it's is AI helping with that as well With the augmenting knowledge does that's something that you use towards

48:17Well first of all learning the concepts and fundamentals But does I either help you being that expert in that field? You know why? Yes, definitely helpful. I think the tools we have there for learning CSS you don't necessarily need it But the thing you can help with is making those updates because what is this? CSS change in ignition other than changing you know One color to another or one number to another on A few different places or maybe using style classes ideally only one place But yeah, it is good that if you didn't use style classes Replacing all of the colors that you wanted to replace instead of you having to go find them all yourself So it is For those more wrote Updates when you have those like templates which we often do in ignition when you need to do that redundant copy place Replace it is good at repeating those actions or producing a script for you to repeat those actions etc. Yeah Do you see Kyle People then eventually not even scripting or writing anymore in ignition and allowing The AI's to well AI to a degree to build based on what you require as an engineer Yeah, closed loop ignition development is I hope a lot of our dreams. It's definitely my dream

49:22Because that would allow us to deliver ignition projects even faster But the only way we would be comfortable with that is once we could see the output of that close-up development be as good as what we Could produce before that So I don't think we're there yet, but it is where I would love to go And I'm sure many other people want to go too It's what I'm sure a lot of people are trying to get to when will happen it's hard to say close loop development I like that Well my my prediction is within the next year will be using you know, agentic ignition development pipelines So that we have embedded CICD embedded QA Development going I guess hand in hand and it's it's going to be an interesting ride for sure Yeah, that's why I left that one playwright tool in that article for those that want to take it to the next level You can start to get your AI to walk around your project and then You can imagine what you want to do from there The skills of SCAT engineer have definitely changed over every industry from all industry four when the three when the first came out to industry four five

50:27SCAT engineers this has been a very interesting discussion Call of helping us understand what that journey looks like the terminologies we have to get familiar with The support around it and and I think I think we're all we're all pretty ignition fans here too The support that ignition does provide not just itself as the business but around the community Carl this has been a great conversation where can they find you follow you reach out to you Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn you can find me on the inductive automation forums I'm always interested in talking about Ignition and helping people learn ignition if you have new teammates trying to learn That article is really all you need I think but I'm always happy to talk Connect with me on LinkedIn to talk more. That's great. Thanks again Carl to you and told our listeners definitely check out the website if you're studying out with ignition or looking at deployment The fact that besides has something for you. This is the kind of conversation. I think that really makes our best show actually feel worth worth listening to worth making because The information that we get out get from our guests is amazing. Yeah, and don't forget everyone to like and subscribe

51:34I'm plugged and I was he podcast where you'll find the latest Information from industry leaders and innovators just like Kyle. Thanks for tuning in today. Thanks again