Smart home and front-end development for fintech – where is the connection? The story of one technology obsession
Imagine the host of “Very Skillful Hands” Andrei Bakhmetyev working in IT. This is roughly what the story of the hero of this text looks like. Back in the 2000s, Vitaly became interested in the ideas that are now being implemented in the “smart home”. 10+ years later, this passion led him to the front end in a very winding way. We tell you how it happened.
I'm five years old, and the TV at home often breaks down.
It’s a tube one, a huge box with circuit boards that you still need to figure out. But my grandfather is a jack of all trades. He spends the whole day digging through the insides of this dinosaur, and I hang around next to him. The TV came with a manual – a huge diagram. It so happened that I learned to read it earlier than regular text.
Since then, curiosity has awakened in me forever. Therefore, I am familiar with the inner world of all my devices. Often you want to improve something, change something. Due to the complexity of the device, this is not always possible. Out of curiosity, I also take it apart, but in most cases I repair what is broken.
The PC era and the beginning of the smart home
The first idea for improvement was suggested by laziness – the engine of progress. I didn't want to have to reach far to light the table lamp. Why not enable it from the keyboard?
This required a program and an understanding of how to connect the lamp to a PC. At that time, only the COM port was available to me. Nowadays it can only be found on industrial equipment, but before it was in every computer, even the mouse was connected through it.
Next is the microcontroller. First I had to make a microcontroller programmer myself. For programming microcontrollers, I chose Assembler and learned it from a book. To write utilities to help, I mastered C#.
No YouTube, he appeared in my life much later. Getting microcontrollers was also difficult: to order from ebay, you had to struggle to find a way to pay. So I went to the radio market and looked for what I needed there.
In general, the lamp has become smarter. And of course I didn't stop. I didn’t want to get up from the couch to pause the movie on the computer – I programmed a device that reads signals from the remote control.
How it was
The story began with the advent of the TV tuner. With him was a remote control, which, when using third-party software, can be used not only with the program of the tuner itself. I wanted to replace the tuner on my receiver. The first receiver was made according to a circuit found on the Internet, and later I assembled and programmed my own.
It sounds strange now, but that was still the era of wired devices. I had USB microcontrollers at my disposal, then wireless devices, wi-fi. Everything passed through my hands.
What about work?
I was adjusting pressure gauges. I also wanted to make work more convenient. When I bought my first Android smartphone, I decided to figure it out too. I learned Java, which turned out to be very close to C#, and wrote an MVP of a simple program in which it was possible to record the type of work performed: quantity and hours. This way I got rid of papers, notepads and endless handwriting into a journal.
There are more and more smart devices at home. By that time, it was a processor load sensor, a memory load sensor, thermometers on seven-segment indicators, later converted to wi-fi.
I wanted to combine readings from sensors into one interface. I was thinking about an Android application for a tablet, but I didn’t have enough knowledge and didn’t want to spend a lot of time. Therefore, the choice fell on the web. This is my first step into the frontend. I currently have a web server on a Raspberry Pi that outputs everything to the tablet.
Yes, it has long been possible to buy ready-made components and make truly smart homes out of them. But this is not my way. I follow how new technologies appear, and time after time I redesign and rewrite my custom devices for them. I like it.
During this time, I managed to get acquainted with Assembler AVR, C#, C/C++, Java, JavaScript, learned to work with a message broker, databases, Docker containers, many applications and services and their configuration.
Why am I still not in IT?
One of the incentives for me to go into IT is to give myself more opportunities to engage in my technical creativity. Every year the hobby became more expensive. With the salary of an ordinary craftsman, it became difficult to buy Raspberry Pi in the quantities that we wanted, for example.
I realized that I knew a lot, but it seemed insufficient for IT. How to look for a job, write a resume, pass interviews? All this was far from my world. So I started thinking about courses. I looked at those that promised help with employment, and almost bought one. But I saw an announcement about a free front-end marathon and decided – I can handle this.
This was a JS and React training from Clevertec. The details are hidden here.
A frontend marathon is an online training lasting 2-3 months. It is not similar to the classic course and is focused on independent work. Every week, participants receive a sprint task, detailed instructions and a list of sources that help complete the task.
Assignments are first checked by automatic tests. Then they go for a review with a mentor – he leaves comments and recommendations. Everyone who reaches the finals undergoes an interview and, based on its results, can get an internship at Clevertec.
The result of the marathon is a full-fledged project for a resume. Over the years, it was an online store, an electronic library and a training application.
Three months of immersion in React
In fact, a marathon is a large project divided into sprints. We made an electronic library. The first sprint involved coding in React. By that time, I only knew how to use static code and watched literally a couple of videos on how to translate it to React. I studied live. I was afraid of not being on time because there were deadlines and latecomers dropped out. The further we went, the less time we spent on tasks. I did it.
Now nothing stops you from coding
After the marathon, I focused on front-end development, learning more JS, TypeScript, and React. A few months later I received an invitation to Clevertec.
Now I'm working on a banking project. In my everyday life there is a lot of code, and it's not always front-end. There are tasks on the backend (node js), refactoring. And I really like it. I don’t switch contexts; in fact, at work and after work I do one thing – program. And I no longer need to adjust pressure gauges.
Nostalgic hobbies for connoisseurs
Sometimes I get tired and take breaks from “home” coding. This year, for example, I took out all my consoles: PS 2, 3,4, Xbox 360. I played them all in a couple of months.
My friend and I also have a tradition of sometimes setting up a custom game server MU Online. This is the first online game I encountered when the computer appeared.
Every few years, we launch the long-standing 6th season on the server for a couple of months so that people can play and feel nostalgic.
The server part is written in C++. The code is very old and poorly written, we had to figure it all out in order to fix bugs and make improvements. There were also difficulties with assembling the project at first.
Honestly, it seems to me that if I figured this out, I can now figure out any large and confusing project.
Clevertec holds frontend marathons for aspiring developers every year. We usually start in January. But pre-registration is already open. You can leave a request by filling out this form. Before the start of the new season, you will receive an email.
