I work across the whole of IoT, mostly in Elixir: the device at the edge, the services behind it, the security that has to hold at both ends, and the update path between them.
The reason I describe it that way rather than as "embedded" or as "backend" is that the interesting problems are almost never at either end. A gateway in a cabinet and a service in a datacentre have to agree about identity, about what is trusted, and about what is still true after a week without a network. That gap is where the work is.
Cloud, microservices and SaaS, for years — which is where I learned that the questions worth asking are architectural. How do the pieces talk? What happens when one of them is offline? Who owns the data, and who is allowed to be wrong about it?
For the last four years I have been following those same questions downwards, into gateways and embedded hardware of all sorts — lately NXP i.MX8M and ST STM32MP1, before that other things. Nerves systems, secure boot and signed firmware, device trees, U-Boot, and the OTA path that decides whether a deployed fleet is an asset or a liability.
The architecture problems are the same ones. There is simply far less room to be wrong about them, and a bad answer is sitting in a cabinet somewhere rather than behind a deploy button.
Rust where it earns its place. Linux underneath all of it. Flutter when the answer needs to be in someone's hand.
I even wrote few firmwares for ESP32 in Rust lately. Still running :)
A good deal of what I know came from getting it wrong first, which is why the writing here spends more time on failures than on finished answers.
Not my main line of work, but a constant one — I have been teaching in some form for as long as I have been working. And I really love doing this.
Currently two courses through SmartNinja: one that takes people from never having written a line of code to a working web application, and a longer one that continues into data engineering — SQL, Pandas and Polars, APIs, scraping, visualisation. Both live, online, in Slovenian.
It changed how I write. If you cannot explain why a thing works to somebody who has never seen it before, you probably do not understand it as well as you think.
I live and work in Slovenia, and always have — remotely for clients elsewhere, mostly. The photographs are from somewhere else entirely.
Ten years of travelling north with my family, mostly with a camera. Scandinavia keeps pulling us back — the light, nature, everything there is just something I love.