LG201: IoT Cloud Server -
Reflection on the Pandemic Module

What a strange year to return to University as a mature student, being surrounded by talented inspired people really brings the best out in me, and every time I walked down the Lewes Rd after being on Campus I knew exactly why I was doing this.

4 months now, I have been locked in my flat writing code on my own, a head full of ideas and wrestling with thousands of lines of code whilst trying to have a conversation with my son playing Minecraft…

“Sounds like every other year of your life” those who know me best will joke, but this isn’t a normal year for any of us. There is fear and there is uncertainty, the future has reminded us of its true nature.

The communication tools that ease this isolation for the younger generation, just make me feel uncomfortable. For instance, I know I could do a much better job of demonstrating this in real life than I will do demonstrating it on Microsoft Teams. But then moaning about modern culture is what being old is all about. I’m proud of what I’ve built here, I don’t think that will be lost on anyone.

This has been a huge undertaking under these circumstances, am I being too ambitious? 9000 words of description, 22000 lines of code…. Yet so many ideas and features not yet implemented, this just keeps growing in my mind, to be honest, I don’t want to stop.

The decision to document each module to the website is, means I am always going to need to write a lot of copy, as well as a lot of code, maybe I need to keep the scope smaller?

Lots of questions, much still to learn.

Beyond Scope

Emails, Templates, Libraries, Customer UI, Device Onboarding UX, Subscriptions, Socket Relays, Voice Services and Access Requests… still plenty to do but I really think the work I’ve done has proven the potential of the idea.

Academic deadlines don’t move, so, therefore, scope can’t creep, I need to lock this down sooner in the next module, DevOps gives me the tools to do this.

Azure DevOps

I love it, all my code and tasks in one place, plus a full history of all my changes. I can add the list above to the next sprint and keep pushing this forward. This will become my default project and source code management environment from now on. The next step is to add Publish Pipelines, so it automatically builds the WebApp when I synchronise the Git Repo… Great stuff!

A system where you can record anything and share it with anyone…

Speaking as a developer, this has been a hugely successful piece of work. I’ve taken a fairly abstract idea, given it substance, and prototyped a system that not only demonstrates it but demonstrates the power of it. I want to show this to people.

We have an incredibly flexible infrastructure, I can write a client that reads the ambient light from one project, and turns the garden lights off in another one. Data doesn’t have to come from sensors, data can come from anywhere, I could write a client that accessed an external API to check if trains are running on time and store the results in a project along with environmental data to look for correlations...

I think I can do anything I need with this, this is a powerful tool as I go forward on this course.

I hope Sally & Weird Jimmy are happy too!