I recently started writing a dev blog and wanted to share the first post here in case it's useful to anyone working with factory IoT or other situations with long-lived browser sessions.
I build factory alerting software, and most of the interesting engineering problems come from the fact that the browsers never close. Workstation kiosks run for entire shifts, sometimes weeks. Supervisor dashboards live on wall-mounted Smart TVs that nobody touches for months. Every assumption I had from normal web development broke one by one during live factory trials: CSRF tokens expiring overnight, timers freezing when machines sleep, deploying new code to pages that haven't been refreshed in days.
The post covers the solutions I landed on, including a multi-layered approach to session recovery, wake detection, and automatic version updates. I figured all of this out the hard way and I'm hoping writing it up saves someone else a few late nights.
SolarpunkRachel•1h ago
I recently started writing a dev blog and wanted to share the first post here in case it's useful to anyone working with factory IoT or other situations with long-lived browser sessions.
I build factory alerting software, and most of the interesting engineering problems come from the fact that the browsers never close. Workstation kiosks run for entire shifts, sometimes weeks. Supervisor dashboards live on wall-mounted Smart TVs that nobody touches for months. Every assumption I had from normal web development broke one by one during live factory trials: CSRF tokens expiring overnight, timers freezing when machines sleep, deploying new code to pages that haven't been refreshed in days.
The post covers the solutions I landed on, including a multi-layered approach to session recovery, wake detection, and automatic version updates. I figured all of this out the hard way and I'm hoping writing it up saves someone else a few late nights.