88. Monitoring Productivity through IoT

Code[ish]

Corey Martin is a Customer Solutions Architect at Heroku. He's interviewing Brandon Stewart, the founder and project lead of GNAR, and Yuri Oliveira, one of its software engineers. GNAR is a software consultancy, and one of their projects involves building an Internet of Things solution for RMS, a freight transportation company. Internet of Things is a broad term used to describe any object that can connect to the Internet or communicate with other devices; popular examples include the Next Thermostat or Amazon Alexa.

For RMS, Brandon and Yuri built a system to monitor trucks transporting shipping containers. Without an IoT infrastructure, truck drivers would communicate with their managers via radio signal, to get a sense of the optimal routes to take or the next task to focus on. With GNAR's IoT setup, the trucks communicate with their home base wirelessly, and there's no ambiguity over what to prioritize. Managers can also take a look at monthly data to track productivity, as well as individual drivers' performance. This gives them insights into both broad analytics and live behavior.

The team at GNAR uses Heroku Postgres, Heroku Data for Redis, and Apache Kafka on Heroku to ingest, process, and store data. Placing their faith in Heroku's products lets them concentrate on building the unique aspects of their business, while offloading the DevOps responsibilities. For both Yuri and Brandon, the delight in working with IoT comes from using their abstract software development skills to affect changes in "the real world." Having that physical impact on a business' operations has been incredible to watch. Brandon believes that there are many industries that could benefit from incorporating IoT. He suggests that people interested in the space investigate industries, ask people questions, and see where opportunities can be found.

Links from this episode

• GNAR is a software consultancy
• Learn more about how GNAR uses Heroku
• Discover how to run Apache Kafka on Heroku