Coding the Internet of Things
By Jeff Eiden
My name is Jeff Eiden. I studied at Northwestern University, where I was first bitten by the technology bug through an entrepreneurship course. The company I co-founded through this course folded soon thereafter, largely because of my inability to contribute technically to the product we were building (I was a communications major and had never been exposed to programming!). From then on, I made a pledge to do whatever it took to teach myself how to code, and prove to myself that I could indeed be a software engineer! That pledge has driven my career from then on — I was a front-end engineer for Deloitte Consulting, application developer for a home security company, and now a senior engineer at a startup in San Francisco called Particle.
I use coding every single day in my industry. My company builds tools to help enable the “Internet of Things,” which is just a fancy term for bringing intelligence to the physical world around us by connecting stuff to the internet.
I use coding every single day in my industry. My company builds tools to help enable the “Internet of Things,” which is just a fancy term for bringing intelligence to the physical world around us by connecting stuff to the internet. Coding is fundamental to both my company’s mission, as well as my own personal responsibilities. We use software to solve problems constantly — from programming micro-controllers, to creating marketing websites, to measuring our success as a business with analytics, to building web applications that are useful to our customers. Frankly, our company wouldn’t be anything without coding!
First and most importantly, it empowers you to build and create, giving you wizard-like abilities.
I believe in the deepest part of my gut that anyone would benefit from learning computer science. Why? Because in my opinion, it is the single most empowering skill to have in today’s technology-driven economy. And I mean empowering in a couple of different ways. First and most importantly, it empowers you to build and create, giving you wizard-like abilities. So many of the world’s issues can, in part, be solved with technology. If you see a problem in the world that you feel is worth solving, you have the power to make an impact without needing to depend on anyone else. That’s amazing! Professional empowerment also means giving you a leg up in your career. Simply put, knowing how to code has helped me get the jobs I want, and rise quickly at the companies I’ve worked for. The reality is that the engineering skill-set is still in incredibly high demand, because there simply aren’t enough qualified people to fill technical roles.
As our world continues to grow more dependent on computers, so will the need to hire smart, passionate people with deep technical expertise (as long as computers don’t start programming themselves for a while :) ).
Jeff Eiden is a software engineer and product designer at Particle, a prototype-to-production platform for developing an Internet of Things product.
Tools and Languages Used: JavaScript, including Ember.js and Node. Ruby on Rails, HTML, and CSS.
