[rdtsc]

> This is why so many “IoT platforms” die in pilot purgatory. They are built by cloud engineers who underestimate the friction of the real world and overestimate the availability of bandwidth.

Indeed. That's why it's important to send your engineers along with the sales folks to these sites. If anything just to get a perspective on things like that.

> The first time I deployed code to an actual factory floor, I learned that "edge compute" doesn’t live in climate-controlled racks. It lives next to dust, grease, and forklifts.

And bugs, real ones not just nice abstract software ones. So you may find yourself debugging spider webs and ants crawling around, which always makes for great puns and stories.

[boulevard]

There is absolutely no substitute for an engineer seeing, smelling, and hearing the environment where their code will actually run. The number of times a mysterious software glitch on a remote device has been traced back to insect nests, rodent chewed cables, or just a thick layer of industrial grime is not zero. It gives a whole new meaning to flushing the cache :)