Just Like LEGOs: Connecting Your Dev Workflow to the Internet of Things

At MidCamp in Chicago this year, I presented Connecting Your Development Workflow to the Internet of Things. My goal in this session was to inspire attendees to think beyond their typical toolkits when working with web technologies. You can view the whole presentation here.

MidCamp felt like a homecoming. I started my web development career living in Chicago and making Drupal 5 sites for theatre companies like Lookingglass and Victory Gardens. I fell down the rabbit hole of web development coming out of college largely because making Drupal sites felt like playing with LEGOs. Modules, fields, Views, and blocks are the equivalent of LEGO pieces inside Drupal and I took to them quickly.

In the decade since I began using Drupal, some of these LEGO pieces have moved. My first sites had self-hosted videos, podcasts, and comment forms. Now, in the Drupal 8 era, it is common to outsource many of those needs to YouTube, SoundCloud, Disqus, and other similar services. Many Drupal developers, myself included, wonder how we can best keep up with the ever changing landscape.

Think Outside the Keyboard

To kick things off, I moved my slides forward with a Makey Makey connected up to my great-grandfather's 141-year-old telegraph key. A Makey Makey is a device that can turn nearly any conductive object into a keyboard key. (Get it? It "Makes" anything a "Key")

I'm bringing my great-grandfather's telegraph (made in 1876) to advance my @midwestcamp slides. pic.twitter.com/WutUbwU0Ej

— Steve Persch (@stevector) March 21, 2017

While not critical to the content of the presentation, using the Makey Makey helped set expectations. Keeping up with the shifting ways web services can connect to one another requires thinking creatively about how we repurpose the tools of old.

JavaScript and Robotics

JavaScript running on a server instead of a browser took some creative thinking. And node.js is still foreign to many in the Drupal and WordPress community. After years in PHP, I wonder if I need to yet again rebuild a blog or other side project site using Angular or React just to keep up with the rest of the web development community. Instead, I find it much more exciting to use JavaScript to control Arduino-connected lights and motors.

Nothing's stranger than using JavaScript (@nodebots) to move a @littleBits motor. pic.twitter.com/9d6byc2B3q

— Steve Persch (@stevector) March 30, 2017

Here an Express server sends the position of a slider in a browser to a motor. Johnny-Five, a JavaScript robotics framework is doing the heavy lifting to talk to the LittleBits Arduino Coding Kit. When I finally get around to using an Express server to build a Headless Drupal or WordPress site, I'll be glad that I first used it in this joke project.

Composer

In fact, most of my Internet of Things experimentation so far has been the creation of joke projects.

Does "composer update" ever run so long that your computer overheats? Cool it off with the @littleBits and Lego leaves. pic.twitter.com/gow8MKOQn6

— Steve Persch (@stevector) March 26, 2017

Joke projects are a great way to learn new technology. Before writing this plugin to trigger a LittleBits cloudBit, I had never written a Composer plugin. And yet everything I write about, discuss, and code these days seems to involve Composer in one way or another. This project helped me fill a gap in my knowledge.

Spending time thinking about how to make a joke with a piece of technology requires thinking about it in different ways. The same week I was coming up with this Composer plugin idea I also came to some breakthrough insight around how Pantheon can better automate Composer-based workflows.

More to Learn

I look forward to sharing more about those Composer insights in future posts. Also, watch this blog for a more detailed write up on the most complex project I presented at MidCamp. Here a Particle Internet Button is calling out to Serverless project running on AWS in order to grab the CircleCI test results for a bunch of my and Pantheon's GitHub projects.

I'm still conflicted about how much the internet's LEGO pieces have moved outside of the monolithic CMS builds of 10 years ago. But I'm glad to have projects that keep me connected to the new pieces.