From 92f96f34ff817526ae850d323a2e46b5117d85e9 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Alannah Tripp Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2025 15:04:52 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] Add 'Introducing Leaf Computing' --- Introducing-Leaf-Computing.md | 9 +++++++++ 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+) create mode 100644 Introducing-Leaf-Computing.md diff --git a/Introducing-Leaf-Computing.md b/Introducing-Leaf-Computing.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..210207b --- /dev/null +++ b/Introducing-Leaf-Computing.md @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +
Right now I’m going to share some concepts publicly for the first time that I've been fascinated by for a decade from my work on Fitbit good watches, Spotify Connect devices, and e-bikes. I name it leaf computing. It’s what I think comes subsequent, after cloud computing. It’s each a complement and a substitute. It’s what I believe is important-each technically and politically-to rebalance the facility of technology again to empowering users first. To elucidate this, I will share just a few tales. In 2015, I spent every week hiking in Banff, Canada. It’s one of the crucial beautiful nationwide parks I've ever been to. Banff is crammed with tall mountains, deep valleys, and wide glaciers. Along with my standard hiking gear, I had a Fitbit health watch and my smartphone. My Fitbit smart watch recorded my GPS location, steps, coronary heart charge, elevation change, and all that nice data from my wrist. At the tip of the day, I needed to view my knowledge on my telephone.
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Solely here was just a little problem. Cell coverage was restricted to the principle roads and even then, it was quite sluggish 3G. Again, it was 2015. It was too sluggish to add all of that knowledge from my smartwatch to Fitbit’s servers. While the upload made regular, incremental progress, Fitbit’s servers would minimize off the connection after 2 minutes. I tried and retried, nevertheless it stored failing after 2 minutes. Now, I was working as a software engineer on Fitbit’s API on the time. I had a hunch about the explanation: our reverse-proxy server timeout was set to a hundred and twenty seconds. We hadn’t anticipated the possibility of a half MB of information taking longer than 2 minutes to add. Keep in thoughts, that’s slower than a 56K modem. My good watch and my sensible phone were not so good when in the wilderness. I had a few of the capabilities, like collecting the info and seeing a few of the data on the watch, but I couldn’t get the complete experience on my cellphone due to my intermittent Web connectivity.
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This connectivity drawback was on the consumer facet, but issues can exist on the server facet as well. A hacker gained entry to Garmin’s inside laptop methods. It held the corporate hostage for 5 days demanding $10M. It’s unknown if Garmin paid the ransom, however for two days it went utterly offline. Most Garmin smart watches just didn’t sync for two days. But server outages are not triggered completely by hackers. AWS is the preferred cloud infrastructure supplier on the earth with 33% marketshare. Which means a major portion of what you do on-line on a regular basis touches AWS’s knowledge centers. What occurs when it goes down? We don’t need to imagine, we get a reminder every few years of what happens. The US-east-1 region is AWS’s most popular datacenter. It’s the default region for a lot of AWS’s companies and typically the primary area to get new options. In December 2021, AWS US-east-1 region went down 3 separate occasions, the worst incident for about 7 hours.
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In style websites like IMDb, Riot Games, apps like Slack and Asana have been simply down. However [websites](https://www.gameinformer.com/search?keyword=websites) and apps that rely on the internet going down is kinda expected in such an outage. More interesting to me however is that floors went unvacuumed during this time. Roomba robotic vacuums stopped working. Doors went unanswered because Amazon [stress management ring](https://www.simsonq.com/index.php/Some_Medical_Doctors_Are_Lukewarm_About_Its_Potential) doorbells stopped working. Individuals were left in the dead of night because some smart light manufacturers couldn’t turn on/off. At the least they ultimately started working once more. I’ve mentioned hackers taking servers offline and cloud providers by accident taking themselves offline, however another way servers go offline is if you stop paying for them as a result of your organization goes out of business. In 2022, good house company Insteon abruptly ceased business operations one weekend. Its customers’ house automations for lights, appliances, door locks, and such simply stopped working with out warning. Emails to buyer support went unanswered. The CEO scrubbed his LinkedIn profile. The corporate just vanished and millions of dollars in sensible residence electronics turned e-waste.
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Thankfully, some of its clients related with one another on Reddit, started reverse engineering protocols, building open source software program, and eventually obtained together to buy the dead company’s belongings. It was a triumph of the human spirit or a minimum of rich techies with some free time. The purpose of this story is that so many of the bodily devices we now own require not simply electricity, but a continuing Web connection. They’re proper beside you bodily and but a world apart as a result of they can’t hook up with a server on one other continent. Okay, last set of tales. There is an Web meme: "There is not any cloud. It’s simply someone else’s computer." The purpose of this meme is to not disparage the real innovation of seemingly boundless computational capacity available immediately with an API request and a credit card. The point of this meme is to remind folks that when you place your information into the cloud, you might be [entrusting](https://www.savethestudent.org/?s=entrusting) different people to take care of it.
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