Jeremy Theocharis

Boring is Awesome | Co-Founder & CTO at UMH

About Me

Building open-source infrastructure for modern manufacturing. Boring is Awesome.

Jeremy Theocharis

Hi, I’m Jeremy. I’m building UMH, open-source infrastructure for factories. We make data plumbing boring and reliable.

I write about manufacturing tech in plain language. Some of it ended up on Wikipedia (1, 2) and HackerNews (3, 4).

In my free time, I read tech books like Designing Data-Intensive Applications and browse Hacker News. Games: mostly indie titles like Balatro and Vampire Survivors, with the occasional AAA exception like Baldur’s Gate 3. League of Legends remains a constant.

Things I Believe

You own the outcome, not the task

  • If it doesn’t move the needle, don’t do it
  • Choosing what not to do is as important as choosing what to do
  • Only do things you’re excited about yourself

Your best idea might be wrong

  • There is nothing like “talent”, it is all just hard work
  • Have strong opinions, loosely held. Change your mind with evidence
  • Mistakes aren’t failures, hiding them is
  • More interested in being right than being seen as right
  • Your best work comes from following your curiosity

Writing is thinking

Think in structures

  • Think carefully, then move decisively
  • MECE
  • Break problems down to fundamental truths. Don’t just copy “best practices” or “industry standards”. Think from the ground up

Hire for growth, not credentials

  • Two hiring answers: hell yes or no
  • Growth potential > current skill
  • Curiosity > CV
  • I care more that one can learn what’s needed than what one already knows
  • Don’t think you’re too good for the boring stuff
  • But don’t keep eating shit forever. First do it well, then build a process

Be authentic

  • I absolutely despise non-authentic people

LLMs are amplifiers

Boring is awesome

Professional Journey

Since 2021: Co-Founder & CTO, UMH
Building open-source infrastructure for modern manufacturing. Started with Kubernetes-based architecture in UMH-Classic, evolved to lightweight edge computing with UMH-Core. Leading also the development of benthos-umh for industrial protocol connectivity.

Secured seed funding from Freigeist Capital (Frank Thelen’s fund) in January 2024.

Took over maintainership of gopcua, the native Go OPC-UA library, in 2025 after the original maintainer stepped back. benthos-umh is built on top of it.

Achieved ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification in December 2025.

Previously:

Before UMH: System integrator (ia: industrial analytics). 20+ projects. Installed, wired, debugged. Learned what actually survives the shop floor.

I worked at McKinsey’s factory lab in Aachen. That’s where I saw how broken factory software really is.

McKinsey Singapore (before I finished my bachelor’s). Got ripped apart. Learned I wanted to stay technical, but now I speak management.

Chair of the Local Board, bonding studenteninitiative. Taught me leadership by showing me what not to do.

Recent Blog Posts

How I Write
2026-01-02
A guide for LLMs (and humans) to write in my voice. Self-demonstrating.

All You Need is Loops (and Humans)
2025-12-31
How to properly use LLMs to prevent producing slop.

I Was Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn and All I Got Was 1.50 EUR
2025-12-28
A Christmas Eve journey. Deutsche Bahn. 35 kilometers.
Featured on HackerNews - 1164 points, 1008 comments

View all posts →

Selected Articles

Articles I’ve written elsewhere. Full list on my company profile.

Video-Series: Downsampling in Industrial IoT: From Dead-Band to Swinging Door Trending
2025-07-14
Multi-part video series demonstrating practical downsampling techniques including dead-band, swinging door trending, and report-by-exception.

AI In Manufacturing Is A Dumpster Fire
2025-07-09
Why most factory-floor LLM demos break apart in production - and how a generate → freeze → test workflow turns “AI” into reliable, audit-grade pipelines instead of costly surprises.

What is MQTT? Why Most MQTT Explanations Suck—and Our Attempt to Fix Them
2025-02-24
Most MQTT tutorials are either too basic or buried in protocol specifications. This explains what MQTT actually does, why it matters for manufacturing, and when you shouldn’t use it.

AWS and Azure are At Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner
2024-10-17
An analysis of cloud infrastructure costs, highlighting why we recommend Hetzner for trying out the UMH.
Featured on HackerNews - 131 points, 138 comments

Why Most Manufacturing Software Sucks — and What We Do Differently at UMH
2024-10-11
Why traditional manufacturing software fails and what we do instead.

Cloud-Native Technologies on the Edge in Manufacturing
2024-07-08
How modern cloud-native technologies fit with the traditional automation pyramid.

Opinion: OPC UA is the Peak of All That Is Wrong in Manufacturing
2024-04-21
A critical look at OPC UA and its impact on the manufacturing industry.

Industrial IoT Visualization: Why United Manufacturing Hub Chose Grafana
2024-07-01 — Grafana Labs Blog
Co-authored with Denis Gontcharov. Why we chose Grafana over traditional industrial visualization tools for our IIoT platform.

The Unified Namespace as the Strongest Architectural Proposal for Industry 4.0
2024-01-22
What Unified Namespace actually is and why it matters.

Integrating the Unified Namespace into Your Enterprise Architecture: An Architect’s Guide
2023-06-22
Covers the different data requirements of frontline workers and business analysts, the roles of OLTP and OLAP databases, and the concept of Lambda Architecture for managing large volumes of real-time and historical data.

The High Compression Deception: A Reality Check on Historians vs Open-Source Databases
2023-05-31
Historians vs open-source databases in oil & gas, pharma, and chemicals. Compression, storage costs, compatibility.

Why Designing Your Own IT/OT Infrastructure is Harder Than You Might Think - 10 Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
2023-05-15
Designing IT/OT infrastructure without MQTT, Kafka, and Kubernetes? We tried that and hit many problems. Here’s what we learned.

Flatcar as the Operating System of the Industrial IoT
2023-02-14
Why we chose Flatcar for Industrial IoT. Our requirements and how we decided.

Comparing MQTT Brokers for the Industrial IoT
2023-01-17
Technical comparison of Mosquitto, VerneMQ, EMQx, and HiveMQ. Which one to pick and why.

Historians vs Open-Source Databases - Which is Better?
2022-08-09
OSIsoft PI, Canary, InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, Ignition. Overview of historians vs time series databases.

Tools & Techniques for Scalable Data Processing in Industrial IoT
2022-05-23
How we handle data processing at UMH. Tools and techniques that work.

Node-RED in Industrial IoT: A Growing Standard
2021-07-14
How an open-source tool is establishing itself in a highly competitive environment against billion-dollar companies.
Featured on HackerNews - 91 points, 28 comments

Why We Chose TimescaleDB over InfluxDB
2021-07-06
TimescaleDB is better suited for the Industrial IoT than InfluxDB because it is stable, mature, and failure-resistant. It uses the very common SQL as a query language, and you need a relational database for manufacturing anyway.

Talks & Conferences

Contact

You can find me on LinkedIn. Also feel free to contact me via email.