My adventures with AWS IoT and beyond

It started out pretty simple. I had just completed the bulk portion of a commissioned Raspberry Pi based embedded application project, and thought it would be a good idea to try and add remote logging to make future troubleshooting easier. Other than a little bit of EC2 linux server configuration and usage a few years ago, my experience with the majority of Amazon Web Services was essentially non-existent. But based on what I researched, it looked like it would be fairly easy to achieve AWS remote logging using a Python library called watchtower (available on PyPi and based on boto3)…

I really enjoy programming in Python. It allows me to focus on creating applications of all kinds without getting mired in boilerplate code, messy frameworks, and complicated toolchains that many other languages generally require. As such, I’ve generally avoided doing much front-end web development. JavaScript, and the ecosystem that has built up around it, just doesn’t appeal to me.

A few weeks ago I stumbled across a Python-to-JavaScript transpiler called Transcrypt. I’ve seen various forms of this type of thing in the past, and they have always had serious drawbacks that made them not worth it for me to dive…