The title was actually inspired by a real incident where a device kept failing every afternoon. We eventually realized that condensation from the facility's massive air conditioning unit was dripping onto the enclosure right above the SoC. We were, quite literally, debugging the effects of humidity. I should have included that story in the post itself.
I feel this blog post hard.
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.
> Now, imagine your request is actuator.rotate(90).
a good example of something that is not idempotent? As it is based on its current position. Actually idempotent would be: `actuator.rotateTo(Degrees(90))` with a predefined frame of reference, or a frame of reference that you can include in the request.
Like the difference between a servomotor vs stepper motor.
I used the simpler, non-idempotent rotate(90) example intentionally to illustrate the default trap. How a pure software mindset can dangerously oversimplify a physical action.
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