#mqtt

Keeping garbage out of the fleet — validating IoT data at ingestion, three ways

“The error path is the part everyone skips. We wired a per-device reject topic and then nothing subscribed to it for six months. Garbage got dropped silently into a topic no one was watching — which is its own kind of garbage.”

Building a connected hardware product — month one

“The hardware decision is a five-year contract with your past self. On v1 I argued for two more bytes and lost. This time the room is mine.”

v2 PRD, Part 2 — applications, data model, cloud

“An entity model is a contract with your future self. Get it wrong and every feature spends the next five years paying interest on the mistake.”

v2 PRD, Part 1 — hardware specs for a battery device

“The PRD answers one question at every layer: 'what does this device need to do that a smartphone with the same app couldn't do?' Every part of the spec earns its place against that question.”

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.”

Node-RED for the automations YAML couldn't handle

“YAML describes state well and logic badly. The moment an automation has to remember what happened five minutes ago, you want a flow you can watch execute — not a nested template you read like assembly.”