JavaScript and the Internet of Things with Andrew Chalkley

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“The lessons that we’re learning on the front-end and on the server side are applicable to hardware. I don’t think that anything’s gonna arise out of hardware that we haven’t thought of yet.”

JavaScript is everywhere, on the browser, the server, and now on hardware. Finally–the Internet of Things is upon us — and it is powered by JavaScript. Even if you consider yourself a web developer, and you have no interest in “maker” culture, keep your eye on this space. Factories in Shenzhen are making better, more modular parts, and the same supply chain economics that are driving down the cost of smart phones and smart cars, will give hobbyist engineers all the simple hardware components they could ever need. This will power a future of proliferated devices that have internet connectivity and “talk” to each other to enable user experiences we wouldn’t dream of today. And naturally, with this will come problems that we cannot anticipate as well.

On today’s episode, Andrew discusses how JavaScript can be used on hardware. Jeff and Andrew talk about the players in the hardware space, as well as how the big cloud players like AWS and Azure are positioning themselves to be the data lakes for the internet of things. Andrew is giving a talk about this at the 2016 O’Reilly Fluent Conference. If you want to win a free ticket to Fluent, tweet about your favorite episode of Software Engineering Daily and tag @fluentconf and @software_daily.

Andrew Chalkley is a hardware hobbyist, software engineer and a full-time teacher at Treehouse.

Questions

• Why are we writing JavaScript on hardware nowadays?
• Is JavaScript actually a good language for hardware, or is it more of an evolutionary outcome?
• Does the JS written for hardware look significantly different from JS on other platforms?
• Why is IoT coming to fruition now – what technology is enabling it?
• Why are embedded linux devices for IoT appealing?
• What are the software libraries used to program JavaScript hardware?
• How do you decide which cloud hosting platforms to invest in when building IoT devices?

Links

• Andrew’s talk at Fluent
• http://www.marvell.com/kinoma/
• Arduino
• Raspberry Pi Foundation
• Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer
• Espruino Pico
• JavaScript on Hardware with Kelsey Breseman
• Johnny-Five
• Adafruit
• Intel Edison
• Andrew on Twitter

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