I didn’t want to click through to this. I was like, “No. A Kindle?” But, the opening image got me. That’s why all I’m sharing is this note and that image.

On April 30th, 2021, I rickrolled my high school district. Not just my school but the entirety of Township High School District 214. It’s the second-largest high school district in Illinois, consisting of 6 different schools with over 11,000 enrolled students.

Who doesn’t like a good rickroll story? This one’s replete with screencaps and video footage

Smart home data is complicated. There are all kinds of devices, and they are in many different combinations, geographies, configurations, etc. This complicated data situation is further exacerbated during a pandemic when time series data seems to be filled with anomalies. Evan Welbourne joins us to discuss how Amazon is synthesizing this disparate data into functionality for the next generation of smart homes. He discusses the challenges of working with smart home technology, and he describes how they developed their latest feature called “hunches.”

David Bryant shared the details and transition plans for WebThings as it’s being spun out of Mozilla as an independent open source project. Mozilla is “transitioning control and responsibility to the community,” and the project’s new home will be webthings.io.

Governance of the project will be passed to the community using a module ownership system independent of the Mozilla Corporation’s organisational structure, like the one used by the core Mozilla project 11. … The WebThings project will no longer be directly affiliated with the Mozilla Corporation so will stop using Mozilla trademarks and will instead operate under its own WebThings brand.

Special guest Nick O’Leary joins us this episode to chat about the Node-RED project, how it started, and the fascinating uses cases for it out in the wild. We go into some of the technical challenges behind designing easy to use interfaces for hardware, and ask Nick what the future of Node-RED looks like.

Mat Ryer hosts our first one-on-one interview-style episode with special guest Ron Evans. Mat asks Ron to teach us about Go in IoT, hardware hacking at Gophercon, TinyGo, and Gopherbot.

We discuss the news (built-in modules, OpenJSFoundation, Lambda School stipends), chat about the internet of JS things, and finish up with one of our favorite segments: shout outs!

KBall and Nick catch up with Nara Kaspergen and Jen Looper for a pair of conversations covering Voice UI Devices, using NativeScript for mobile development, and Jen’s work with Vue Vixens helping make the Vue.js community welcoming to women and non-binary people.

A fascinating read, answering this question:

What if you were to leverage a tool designed to run in data centres such as Kubernetes to run a solar plant?

Elixir gets its very own UI framework focused on connected devices (IoT). Scenic apps run identically across operating systems, including MacOS, Ubuntu, Nerves/Linux, and more.

Notably, Scenic does not use any browser technologies. Learn all about it in Boyd Multerer’s ElixirConf 2018 talk.

We’re on location at Microsoft Build 2018 talking with Julia White, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft — a 17 year Microsoft veteran. We talked with Julia about her take on this “new Microsoft”, Satya Nadella’s first appearance as CEO when they revealed the first glimpse of Microsoft’s cloud offering which started with Office, the beginnings of Microsoft Azure, Azure as the world’s computer, and how every company is becoming a software company.

At Build 2018 Microsoft open sourced their Azure IoT Edge runtime to give developers the ability to create smart edge applications. The announcement came, but it seems the readme on the repo says it is pending an official open source release.

The second version of Azure IoT Edge is in public preview. We intend to open source the code when the product enters general availability and will place the code here.

Either way, we’re excited about what’s to come.

Michelle Gienow:

The recent release of the Fitbit Ionic marked Fitbit’s first true smartwatch. More significant to the JavaScript developer community, though, is the fact that the Ionic was produced and shipped using JerryScript, a lightweight JavaScript engine built to power the Internet of Things.

I heard some hubbub about JerryScript last year at OSCON EU, but not much since. Fitbit using it in their first attempt at a production smart watch is a big vote of confidence for the project.

I recently bought into Samsung’s SmartThings (which is not open), but this open source announcement from Mozilla has me rethinking my choice.

Project Things is an open framework for connecting your devices to the web.

Let’s welcome the Mozilla IoT team and all their sources to GitHub.

Also, check out their Web Thing API spec to see how Mozilla is leading the way to an open standard for IoT.