I work for a company doing unsexy IoT and I've been dreaming about writing this article for months now. We're a tiny company in New Jersey whose been around in some form or another for the last 25 years, supplying remote telemetry units (RTUs) to the industrial assets industry. Helium, oxygen, nitrogen, whatever, on boats, trucks, and static sites. We also provide a monitoring platform which is where I come in. We're a very uncool Apple - vertically integrated, we design, build, manufacture, ship, and program all of our RTUs in-house. IoT has been around for a long long time now - a lot of our work comes from clients who can't maintain their old systems anymore.

The entire hype wave of IoT has more or less passed right over us. Nobody has heard our name, save for the gas industry itself. But that industry is about to (not literally) explode. Helium is an extremely lucrative industry and is growing by the minute, and there's really nobody in this space but us. Remote monitoring - IoT - has never been more critical to helium than it has now. Without going into too much detail, knowing the pressure levels of your tank 24/7 can save you a lot of money.

So where do I come in? Our platform is written in C#, with the front-end done in Silverlight. I'm the dude getting us off it with some really hip JS work in React. Before that I wrote a lot of microservices to handle various aspects of our system. We were in a pretty bad state when I got there so I spent a lot of time improving our development team. We didn't have PRs for a long time. For a first job out of college, it's not bad. I get to do a lot of cool work, and on my current project I've made every technical decision. But sometimes I wish that we could attract better talent. Oh well, I'm (hopefully) leaving soon.