Luke Angel
The Bookcase

The Notebooks.

Multi-part guides, bound and shelved. Pull one down.

14 notebooks · 191 entries
Articles Notebooks
A loose mesh of small nodes around two larger rust-orange hub nodes, connected by thin spokes, with a single dashed bridge link crossing through an intermediate ring node. Cream background, faint dot grid, vertical rust-orange accent bar at the left edge.
Notebook · 8 parts

Building A Distributed Mesh in Rust

"I wanted to feel where a self-organizing P2P mesh in Rust breaks before I trusted it with anything. iroh-gossip over QUIC, run small and run hard. The first 18 nodes pegged an 80-core box at 100% CPU; weeks of flamegraphs and soak tests later the same 18 idled at 5%. This notebook is the work as it happened — the wrong hypotheses, the flamegraphs, the leaks (some mine, some upstream — a churn leak I chased for two days turned into fixes across three crates), and then the harder build: a multi-mesh fabric you can actually see."

2026 open →
A DIY pet collar tracker on a workbench: a teal PCB puck clipped to a collar strap emits radio signal beside a coin-cell battery, a microcontroller chip, a soldering iron on a pad, and a location pin, with a dog wearing the collar.
Notebook · 5 parts

IoT Pet Health Tracker — Build

"Twelve years of paying other people's subscriptions to learn my pets are home. This is the build log for the tracker I actually want — cheap, no-subscription, months of battery, location first and health later — designed the way I'd run any connected-product program, then soldered together nights and weekends."

2026 open →
Building IoT Connected Products v2
Notebook · 13 parts

Building IoT Connected Products v2

"The PRD for v2 was a list of v1's mistakes, inverted. Wireless: don't pick the protocol before you know the duty cycle. Identity: per-device cert from boot zero, not bolted on at scale. OTA: signed, staged, rollback-able, or don't ship. Building the same kind of platform a second time — on purpose."

2023–2026 open →
A model at the center — drawn as a small neural-net graph — fed by an operations pipeline on one side and serving a product on the other, with a dashed feedback loop returning from the product back to the pipeline.
Notebook · 14 parts

Building with AI/ML — Products & Operations

"Bedrock went GA in the fall of 2023, and within a few months the team had a live feature running on it. Three years on it's an agent stack in production, a prompt-regression set that catches drift before customers do, and a quarterly spend audit that keeps the bill honest. The running log of getting AI/ML into real products — and building the operations to run it without lighting money on fire."

2023–2026 open →
A two-by-two clarity-versus-evidence grid, its four cells distinctly tinted — build, test, analyze, drop — on a cream background with a faint dot grid and a vertical rust-orange accent bar at the left edge.
Notebook · 5 parts

The Four-Column Ask

"Two questions — how clear is the solution, how strong is the evidence — sort every roadmap idea into build, test, analyze, or drop. Each column is a different discipline and a different next move. Five posts: the framework, then one per column, ending with the hardest one — learning to kill what you're attached to."

2026 open →
A settled cobalt forecast curve sweeping in from the left, then forking at a marked point into three dashed branches — one climbing, one flat, one fading — over a left-to-right row of device silhouettes: a round thermostat, a voice speaker, a smartwatch, a connected camera, and AR glasses.
Notebook · 11 parts

IoT & Connected Devices — Year in Review

"Every January, a connected-devices forecast — last year's bets scored honestly against what actually shipped, then this year's placed in the open. Read it forward and the field grows up in front of you: smartwatches become a category, voice goes from sci-fi to ambient in three years, AR glasses start eyeing the phone's job. Read it backward and the patterns surface — protocol fragmentation that never resolves, the long regulatory gate on medical-grade wearables, and the category-creators that don't survive their own runway."

2016–2026 open →
Smart Home IoT — An Engineer's Journey
Notebook · 61 parts

Smart Home IoT — An Engineer's Journey

"Hue gen 1 went on a kitchen pendant in October 2012. Thirteen years and four protocol migrations later, the kitchen is a Samsung Bespoke install running Matter to Home Assistant. The protocol wars, the platform collapses, the products that bricked themselves — documented in the order it happened, by someone who never reset and started over."

2012–2025 open →
Pet IoT — An Engineer's Field Guide
Notebook · 42 parts

Pet IoT — An Engineer's Field Guide

"Atom got the first Whistle in October 2013. Joule, Boson, and Quark came later. Twelve years of every shipping pet device, every protocol shift, every vendor collapse and acquisition — kept the way an engineer keeps notebooks, in the order it happened."

2013–2025 open →
IoT Security — The Full Stack
Notebook · 8 parts

IoT Security — The Full Stack

"Per-device identity that scales clean to a million devices, seven layers of defense you can actually deploy, and an OTA pipeline you can sleep through a Friday rollout on. The connected-product security posture I'd ship with confidence — and a playbook you can lift directly."

2025 open →
PM Fundamentals notebook cover — Managing Project Stakeholders artwork.
Notebook · 5 parts

Project Management Fundamentals

"The fundamentals — scheduling, stakeholders, quality, procurement, integration, working with small projects."

2016–2025 open →
Annual PM trend forecast — wave imagery and trend lines.
Notebook · 7 parts

PM Trends — Year in Review

"Project management trend predictions, one year at a time, from 2019 forward."

2019–2025 open →
Building Medical IoT Connected Products
Notebook · 7 parts

Building Medical IoT Connected Products

"Two years (2017–2019) building the API platform behind a BLE consumer-health portfolio. Phone-as-gateway, home-grown REST, and the OTA push that haunted my dreams."

2017–2019 open →
Stack of transparent Docker containers — header art for the Docker ecosystem notebook.
Notebook · 5 parts

The Docker Ecosystem

"A hands-on tour of the Docker ecosystem — what containers are, how they network, how to find each other, and how to orchestrate them at scale."

2015–2016 open →
IoT & Connected Devices — Year in Review
Notebook · 0 parts

IoT & Connected Devices — Year in Review

"Eleven years of connected-device predictions and outcomes, one post per year from 2016 on. First half: last year's predictions scored. Second half: what's next."

open →