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**Erik St. Martin:** Most of it for IoT is gonna be some sort of RF-based thing - Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, things like that. You could do an USB interface or an SD card if it's not something... But for debugging purposes though, a lot of those debug interfaces - you can actually just have like a serial connection to your comp... |
One thing I will say learning about hardware - if you're not trying to actually design the electrical circuit, if you're just trying to build a gadget with Arduino and stuff, it's far more approachable than I thought it was... And especially, a lot of the chips speak really common serial interfaces - you have SPI, I2C ... |
\[51:57\] You can get a lot of chips and wire them together. A lot of times there's -- Adafruit and SparkFun are probably my favorite places, because you can just order little breakout boards and then you only have to wire up the power and the serial lines and you're good. You don't have to worry about all the capacito... |
Carlisia, did you get to work with hardware at all, or you just mainly wrote firmware? |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I didn't write firmware, I didn't write embedded code... I wrote code that drove machines, like printers and lemonadors - these huge custom-made machines. And even so, it was a pain sometimes. \[laughter\] The machine would turn off and I wouldn't know how to turn it on... Silly things. \[laughte... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** There was no power button? |
**Carlisia Thompson:** All the interruptions you can have with hardware programming... And then the hardware breaks and you have to stop and you're like "Okay, I don't even know where to start here." |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah... Recording circuitry goes wrong and the voltage level drops... Your main voltage coming across the board, like "That should never go below 5 Volts" and it does, and it puts your microcontroller in a weird state... And then there's people who do this on purpose. |
In the reverse-engineering hardware world there's a thing called "glitching" - you can basically set... The name for these attributes are escaping me, but there's attributes on the chip where you can basically put it in a read-only mode, which is what you usually do when you produce this, so that people can't read the ... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** I don't know... Sounds like SQL injection to me... \[laughter\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** I remember the first time I saw a talk about that, and I was like "You what...?! You just glitched the power and you're like, "Oh, we're in!"? They'll take heat guns, FLIR cameras and stuff like that, and they'll X-ray the chips and be able to see the communication that's happening between individu... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** I'll stick to the cloud thanks... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Johnny, Kavya - do either of you tinker with hardware at home? |
**Kavya Joshi:** Tinker is as far as I've gotten... I've ordered an Adafruit board. When it gets here, I think I'll start playing with it. But I don't have any awesome projects lined up. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, it always starts with something silly, and sometimes that's just a matter of finding a sensor... One of the first things I ever did was -- this was before Arduino got really big... There was a company called NerdKits, and a couple of people at work had bought one. Basically, if you picture th... |
\[56:04\] That's kind of where I started out, and one of my projects was somebody had sent me a gas sensor that supposedly was able to detect also alcohol... I was like "I'm gonna build a breathalyzer." \[laughter\] I don't know why, but I just found it cool at the time. |
I'll go through Adafruit or SparkFun or something and just look through stuff, and be like "Oh, that's cool... I'm gonna get an LED Matrix. I encourage anybody who hasn't played with hardware just to even start with like a basic Arduino board, and find a shield to go with it. You start realizing it's not as unapproacha... |
Brian is not on the show today, but him and I have been working on a controller for our smokers for barbecue, the heat controller stuff... He has set up an example with a Raspberry Pi, and just talking I2C over the GPI Pins to some relays, and stuff. It's pretty easy to interface with some of that stuff. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** I was so bummed when his talk to actually do a barbecue using his [PID Controller at GopherCon](https://blog.gopheracademy.com/advent-2016/qpid/) was not accepted. I wonder if the fire marshal had anything to do that. \[laughter\] Like "A live barbecue at a conference? Why not!?" |
**Erik St. Martin:** I don't know whether they ever responded back to us about that... About whether or not we could bring our own barbecues. But there's still the lightning talk stuff, too... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** That's true... |
**Erik St. Martin:** The hardest part about the talk selection process is the sheer number of submissions we get. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** And WHEN we get them... We're talking about the tail end of the deadline here... \[laughter\] |
**Kavya Joshi:** I guess I won't tell you when I submitted my talk... \[laughter\] |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Oh, we know... \[laughter\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think we kind of sidelined there on some cloud and hardware. |
**Kavya Joshi:** All the good things. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think your talk is gonna be pretty fascinating... I think people really are receptive to how do things work under the covers talks. |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yeah. I feel like the core contributors of Go also do a very good job talking or explaining, publishing articles of how things work under the hood. There is not content - or I can't find any content - online about channels already, but the design docs for the scheduler, for example, the garbage collect... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think that the reason for a lot of that is probably just because -- it's a common thing I think I've heard from the Go team when I asked about some of this stuff... It's their implementation details. I think maybe there's hesitation to put a lot of content our there about how these things are imp... |
Plus, like you said, having an understanding of this brings more people to the discussion of like "How does this work? How SHOULD it work?" and things like that, rather than it being kind of like a secret organization. It's like, "Oh, that's the compiler... Nobody crosses that barrier." |
**Kavya Joshi:** \[01:00:08.20\] Yeah, and I was gonna say, it's also something about the Go community as well... Every time one of these design documents is put out, for example, the document is swarming with people reading it and commenting on it on Hacker News, so there's clearly an interest from programmers (and Go... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Alright, so one of the things we do in each episode - and I'm not sure how much time we have left... But sometimes we'll talk about some interesting projects or news or things that we've come across in the past week (or sometimes more, if we didn't have time to talk about it in the show before). Is... |
**Kavya Joshi:** [GopherJS](https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs) is pretty cool... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Brian was in love with GopherJS. I think he's still playing with it on and off, but he was a big advocate for a while. |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yeah... Writing JavaScript straight up takes me so much time, but with GopherJS now, I don't even have to. It's wonderful. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think I've spent so many years writing JavaScript that it's just easier for me to just write JavaScript... But in all fairness, I haven't tried GopherJS. |
**Kavya Joshi:** We're actually considering writing large swathes of our JavaScript code in Go, so we can use GopherJS, and then run JavaScript. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Here's an interesting question about the adoption of GopherJS - how does that typically work, say, at your company? Because thinking about the way most companies are structured, you usually have a backend team and a frontend team, and the frontend team typically controls a lot of the JavaScript... ... |
**Kavya Joshi:** The engineering team at Samsara is pretty small - we're like 10-12 people, and we certainly have areas of focus. I'm on the assistance or the backend team (and there's three of us on that team), but the teams are not so much rigidly defined teams; they're fluid teams. I don't tend to do a lot of fronte... |
In general, the parts that we want to convert to Go and then use GopherJS for - I feel like it'll have to be in a slow and careful transition, like piece by piece. But I feel like the team as a whole is on board with it. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Oh, that's really interesting. That's always been a question of mine for people adopting it. But yeah, I guess if you're working across the stack, that makes sense. But Go is not that hard to pick up though, I guess I'd argue... Maybe less though than JavaScript; it's easier to pick up some JavaScr... |
**Kavya Joshi:** \[laughs\] In my opinion, but that's just me... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Don't start a war... \[laughter\] |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[01:03:54.06\] I have two community-related news to share. One is the videos for GopherCon India 2017 are out. There are about [22 videos](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFjrjdmBd0CoclkJ_JdBET5fzz4u0SELZ), there are some really good presentations there. And also today, in a couple hours,... |
**Erik St. Martin:** This is interesting, I just clicked the link. What are pragmas...? |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, right...? \[laughs\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** The name came from the Pragma declaration that tell C compilers to alter their interpretation of pieces of code. Now, Go doesn't have a Pragma directive, but it does have ways of altering the operation of the Go compiler via directive syntax hidden in comments. Interesting. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** And that was Erik reading from the description of the meetup. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I literally had not heard that this meetup was taking place until you just said something, so I happened to click the link, like "What is this?" |
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