The Internet of Things today is a labyrinth of complex decisions with unclear tradeoffs. Everywhere a developer looks, there are new technologies to learn, many times without an obvious advantage over more pedestrian technologies as used on the interent at large.
So how’s this for a mission statement: Let’s make it boring. Predictable, familiar, intuitive, transparent. Only when the basic building blocks are abstractions that are either well known or simple to pick up (or both!) can we make it accessible to developers that aren’t willing to spend years drilling into the minute differences between isolated proprietary platforms. And only with a cricital mass of developers can we focus on making the IoT an everyday reality that is known as “the Internet” as applied to more things.
Parsing our front page and blog you can see tons of exciting buzzwords: Git push! Docker containers! Yocto Linux! Node.js! npm! Single Board Computers! You get the idea. What isn’t immediately obvious is that each of these building blocks is the most suitable abstraction for the problem it’s solving, and most of these building blocks are well understood, with millions of developers already readily manipulating them on a day-to-day basis. This is the theme that brings them all together.
So let’s do it together: let’s build an Internet of Things infrastructure as boring as possible (but no more)! If for no other reason, let’s do it to allow the awesomeness to be concentrated on the applications developers will build.
At the end of the day, when it comes to infrastructure, boring is very exciting!
Any questions? or you’d just like to say hi, come find us on our community chat.
