Hey, thanks a lot! Really appreciate you reaching out!
I agree. There's so many cool things to do in this space, and so many unique ways to achieve them. We're excited to be here, and would love to chat sometime as well!
The core issue is the user/developer experience of Industrial IoT is nowhere near where it should be. I understand where you're coming from, and I feel the same way too. Building a great developer experience is something we deeply care about. Exactly for that reason, we started building our own Device SDKs.
We also have support for open protocols such as MQTT and HTTP+SSE, but the Device SDKs enable us to provide a richer set of capabilities. Our SDKs actually speak a custom protocol we developed for higher efficiency. We're also going to add many more features such as automatic telemetry collection and tracing support, which is more feasible with a plug-and-play SDK.
Another big issue you pointed out is with documentation, a key part of Developer Experience is always great docs. A compelling model might be standalone open source tooling that works independently, with an integrated platform that ties it all together, creating a strong ecosystem.
I've been using Home Assistant with a bunch of Zigbee and Wifi devices at home, and it's been pretty stable. However, for an industrial context, there are already many other hurdles, having a platform handle a lot of the cloud infra and connectivity & monitoring is really helpful.
The problem with custom protocols and SDKs is vendor dependence. When you go out of business or pivot, what happens to my product? I was already burned once by Google cloud IoT...
You’re completely right. Vendor lock-in and platforms shutting down are real risks. We also used Google IoT Core in our previous startup and would have been burned by its shutdown as well.
In fact, the idea for a unified IoT platform came from dealing with the complexity of setting up so many different Google Cloud services just to get data ingestion working.
I think a healthy balance between open source and commercial platforms is possible. We want to compete on reliability, UX, and features while building open device-side tooling and protocols that give users the ability to switch or self-host if they choose. We’re far from that today, but it’s the direction we want to pursue.
Hey, thanks for the feedback. Great point! We're gonna add something like this to the landing page soon. And we're going to write a few blog posts showing quick integrations across different hardware and protocols as well.
I've always been unhappy with the way tasking/todo app (don't) work for me. I just started building a TUI in Zig (with the help of Codex) to manage my daily tasks. And since I'm building it just for me, the scope is mine to determine too.
I can see this becoming a pretty generally accepted AI usage policy. Very balanced.
Covers most of the points I'm sure many of us have experienced here while developing with AI. Most importantly, AI generated code does not substitute human thinking, testing, and clean up/rewrite.
On that last point, whenever I've gotten Codex to generate a substantial feature, usually I've had to rewrite a lot of the code to make it more compact even if it is correct. Adding indirection where it does not make sense is a big issue I've noticed LLMs make.
> AI generated code does not substitute human thinking, testing, and clean up/rewrite.
Isn't that the end goal of these tools and companies producing them?
According to the marketing[1], the tools are already "smarter than people in many ways". If that is the case, what are these "ways", and why should we trust a human to do a better job at them? If these "ways" keep expanding, which most proponents of this technology believe will happen, then the end state is that the tools are smarter than people at everything, and we shouldn't trust humans to do anything.
Now, clearly, we're not there yet, but where the line is drawn today is extremely fuzzy, and mostly based on opinion. The wildly different narratives around this tech certainly don't help.
> Isn't that the end goal of these tools and companies producing them?
It seems to be the goal. But they seem very far away from achieving that goal.
One thing you probably account for is that most of the proponents of these technologies are trying to sell you something. Doesn't mean that there is no value to these tools, but the wild claims about the capabilities of the tools are just that.
No, the code is generated by a tool that's "smarter than people in many ways". So which parts of "thinking, testing, and clean up/rewrite" can we trust it with?
Trust is a function of responsibility, not of smarts.
You may hire a genius developer that's better than you at everything, and you still won't trust them blindly with work you are responsible for. In fact, the smarter they are than you, the less trusting you can afford to be.
Very little, until it stops being stupid in many ways. We don't need smart, we need tools to not be stupid. An unreliable tool is more dangerous and more useless than having no tool.
This is such a good write-up and something I'm struggling with very hard. Does quality of code in the traditional sense even matter anymore if e.g. CC can work with said code anyway. I haven't had imposter's in a long time, but it's spiking hard now. Whenever i read or write code I feel like I'm an incompetent dev doing obsolete things.
Everything except the first provision is reasonable. IMO it's none of your damn business how I wrote the code, only that I understand it, and am responsible for it.
It's one of those provisions that seem reasonable, but really have no justification. It's an attempt to allow something, while extracting a cost. If I am responsible for my code, and am considered the author in the PR, than you as the recipient don't have a greater interest to know than my own personal preference not to disclose. There's never been any other requirement to disclose anything of this nature before. We don't require engineers to attest to the operating system or the licensing of the tools they use, so materially outside your own purant interests, how does it matter?
It's a signal vs noise filter, because today, AI can make more mistakes. Your operating system or IDE cannot lead you to make a similar level or amount of mistakes while writing code.
It is of course your responsibility, but the maintainer may also want to change their review approach when dealing with AI generated code. And currently, as the AI Usage Policy also states, because of bad actors sending pull requests without reviewing or taking the responsibility themselves, this acts as a filter to separate your PR which you have taken the responsibility for.
Maintenance, for one. I imagine contributions that are 100% AI generated are more likely to have a higher maintenance burden and lower follow-up participation from the author in case fixes are needed.
I think I’m going to use it as a guide for our own internal AI guideline. We hire a lot of contractors and the amount of just awful code we get is really taking a toll and slowing site buildouts.
What I understood from this is that LinkedIn and Email outreach are quite effective for leads. 1-on-1 conversations and the obsessive focus on solving problems different customers face do feel the right way to go about sales.
We just launched Fostrom [1], an IoT Cloud Platform designed for developers. I was wondering what else have others found effective in this space to do sales and outreach?
I'm building Fostrom (https://fostrom.io), an IoT Cloud Platform. We have Device SDKs to simplify integrating devices, powered by a small Device Agent written in Rust.
I wanted to support RISC-V boards too, so I went with the Milk-V Duo S as the test device. I have managed to get Tailscale working, and our Device SDK works too, with the bundled Python.
The experience of using the Milk-V Duo is definitely not as straightforward as the Pi Zero, but it does work, and is easily available in most places, unlike some of their other products. The Linux distro they provide is quite barebones, and I wasn't able to get Debian working. The docs for the device are pretty decent. I hope we get better support for Debian/Alpine/Arch for these kinds of boards soon.
In Fostrom, devices connect via our SDKs or standard protocols such as MQTT and HTTP, and send and receive structured, typed data, through pre-defined Packet Schemas. Each device gets its own sequential mailbox for messages. You can trigger webhooks or broadcast messages to other devices based on incoming data, powered by programmable actions (written in JS).
We entered Technical Preview recently. Since then, we've been working on:
- Major upgrades to Actions: making it easier to write action code, along with testing before deploying, and more docs on how to write good actions. Coming this week.
- We're in the process of releasing Device SDKs in multiple languages, including JS, Python, and Elixir soon. The SDKs are powered by an underlying lightweight Device Agent written in Rust.
- A new data explorer to view and analyze your fleet's datapoints, which will be available in a few weeks.
Happy to answer questions and appreciate any feedback.
Reading this post reminded me of another book I read a few years ago: Curious Moon [0].
It is written as a novel that teaches PostgreSQL by exploring the dataset of the Cassini orbiter around Enceladus, Saturn's moon. Highly recommended and fun read.
I agree. There's so many cool things to do in this space, and so many unique ways to achieve them. We're excited to be here, and would love to chat sometime as well!
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