Dave Thomas
CEO Bedarra Corp, and Adjunct Research Professor Carleton University
The remarkable advances in hardware miniaturization, performance, and cost reduction have enabled a world of pervasive IoT devices. However, while other platforms—mobile, clients, and servers—have wholeheartedly adopted modern development practices, languages, tools, and runtimes, IoT application development remains largely unchanged. This stagnation has resulted in IoT application development remaining a specialized craft. As device complexity increases, development budgets surge while reliability and security decline.
Drawing from four decades of experience in embedded applications, this talk examines why IoT applications present unique challenges and explores why alternatives to traditional C development have struggled to gain traction. We share insights from our experience with modern development approaches for IoT and advocate for an application-centric paradigm that enables complex IoT development through low-code approaches, executed on efficient, compact embedded runtimes.