Journeyman: Evothings

Journeyman: Evothings

Evothings turned out to be an unexpected, but pleasant tour stop. When setting the dates it wasn't even certain that it would be the tour stop. I had namely latched on to Peter Svensson rather than a particular company. Why? Well, Peter is a renowned Javascript developer and, as you might have gathered, I'm not a huge Javascript fan. So what better way to re-evaluate that notion than to spend a week pairing on Javascript with Peter, I thought. To me, that Peter was working at Evothings when the tour stop came up was mostly by chance.

Peter in action

In the end I actually didn't do a great deal of Javascript pairing with Peter, but I got a deep-dive into the world of Internet of things, or IoT for short. Evothings is a startup whose main product, Evothings Studio, is a development platform for mobile apps that interact with various IoT devices. I like to think of it in terms of Xcode for HTML5/Javascript applications to be used with networked, embedded devices and sensors.

Apps for devices

Also, for various scheduling reasons, the tour stop was split into to two parts of two days each, about a month apart. This meant that when returning for the second round, I got to see that some of the design discussions and work that we did during my first visit had gone into or was about to go into production. I returned just as the team was preparing a new beta version of the 2.0 release of the platform. Thus we didn't do a whole lot of programming, but certainly a bit of testing.

More interestingly I participated in a work meeting covering backlog grooming and strategy. Partly bringing a bit of an outside perspective, but mostly getting a better grasp of the challenges and opportunities Evothings have in front of them.

While this tour stop didn't exactly go according to the original plans, I got a good look at a segment of the technology world I previously have had very little to do with. All in all, a worthwhile investment of time.

Thanks for having me Evothings and good hunting!

The Evothings team