#local-first

SmartThings Edge drivers — Samsung goes local-first

“The reason I migrated off SmartThings in 2017 was the cloud round trip. Edge drivers remove it. The platform finally executes where the devices are.”

DIY ESP32 pet feeder — vendor-cloud independence for $35

“An ESP32 + servo + 3D-printed hopper is $35 in parts and zero monthly subscription. The reliability is whatever I make it. The vendor solvency dependency is gone. This is what the post-Petnet pet-IoT category should have shipped years ago.”

Ripping out vendor clouds — going local-first on Home Assistant

“When the internet went out during a March storm and the family's school + work calls all dropped, the lights, locks, and security alarm kept running. Local-first was an architectural opinion until the pandemic; now it's a requirement.”

MQTT as the house's nervous system — one broker, every device

“When every device speaks to one broker instead of to each other, killing a vendor's cloud API stops being a catastrophe and becomes a footnote. You lose one device's features, not the web. That's the whole point of a nervous system — you can lose a finger without losing the hand.”

Works with Nest is dead — platform risk, made real

“The cloud integration you built your morning routine on is a feature someone else can delete in a blog post. Works with Nest didn't break. It was withdrawn. That's a different kind of failure, and you can't engineer around a business decision — only around the dependency.”

ConBee + deCONZ — taking Zigbee off the SmartThings hub

“A radio you don't control isn't local-first, no matter where the automation logic runs. The SmartThings hub was a cloud account wearing a Zigbee antenna. The ConBee is just an antenna.”

First Home Assistant install — YAML and local-first

“The pitch: everything you've been running through SmartThings's cloud now runs on a $35 board in your closet. Tonight I'm finding out if the pitch is true.”