About Me
Placeholder: replace with your own bio, skills, and projects.
Who I am
Herb Owenby, [current role / background]. A short line or two on where you're coming from and what you're aiming for.
Relevant skills
- SQL / MySQL basics
- General database concepts
- Some Linux command-line experience
- [add more as you pick them up]
Past projects
- This learning tracker itself: a PHP/MySQL app built and deployed from scratch, including its own quiz bank and progress tracking.
- [add other relevant projects here]
Company Research
What I've pieced together about Xylem/Sensus and the role: informed inference, not insider knowledge.
The company
Sensus, part of Xylem, builds utility metering technology (water, gas, and electric) that lets utilities remotely read and manage meters at scale.
FlexNet: their core technology
FlexNet is Sensus's proprietary radio network for smart meter communication: point-to-multipoint, using licensed spectrum rather than cellular. It's built for longevity (compatible with meters installed decades ago) and offered as a "network as a service," so utilities lease it instead of building their own infrastructure.
How the data likely flows
Best guess, not confirmed: smart meter → FlexNet RF network → base station → head-end / data collection system (Linux-based) → PostgreSQL → Perl scripts (validate, transform, load) → downstream billing, analytics, and alerting systems.
Why this shapes what I'm learning
Utility deployments in this space run tens to hundreds of thousands of meters, generating continuous timestamped readings: high-volume, time-series-like data, not simple transactional data. The Postgres/Perl work is very likely ETL-style at that scale, which is why I'm building Linux/Docker/Postgres/Perl fluency specifically, rather than generic full-stack skills.
Learning Roadmap & Testing
Track progress through the stack, and quiz myself on it.
Test yourself
Pick a topic, or quiz across everything.