New video that also nods to my recent efforts. First time I shot a video together with my wife and the first one I edited myself. Quite happy with how it turned out. It is not long. You can watch 1:19 for a laugh :)

Musik by Oferlund as per usual, used with permission.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K23DDFreXr4

Imagine Nerves, but in the Cloud

No, but kinda. So yeah, I am doing a startup. Which was quite unexpected for me. I was definitely in a mood for change as I was looking to pivot Underjord towards Nerves when the opportunity came up. Josh Kalderimis posted about NervesCloud in #nerves on the Elixir Slack and I nodded my head a bit. Cool, glad to see someone trying to host NervesHub.

I think I reached out to Josh about coming on BEAM Radio to talk about the plan for NervesCloud and he said that he would be happy to when there was more to it and people could use it.

I poked a few people about the effort and Frank (Hunleth, creator of Nerves) filled me in on some backstory. Josh was one of the Travis CI creators in ye olden times, that company did quite well. Since about 6 months he had been contributing a bunch to NervesHub, especially for making it easy to host and set up, getting it ready to go on Fly via container.

As me and Josh chatted we ended up discussing some collaboration. We clearly both had adoption on our minds. We both see growing the Nerves ecosystem as a contender in the Embedded Linux as an important thing. We found ourselves quite well-aligned. At some point he raised the suggestion that I should come on and help do NervesCloud. I was surprised I was even considering it.

I've been quite happy running Underjord and doing consulting, for the variety, for the flexibility and the really good pay whenever the market doesn't go on a rollercoaster. I also have a preference for indie efforts. Indie hacking or starting a self-sustaining business is the thing I believe in more strongly. I think that has a better sustainability and robustness both in terms of pace, success modes and failure modes. It operates at a small scale and I typically prefer that.

The reason to do a startup for this is adoption. To grow the ecosystem, to invest in the tooling, to spread the word. That takes money to offset the time I'd normally be doing client hours. It will take investment and it can give a large return over time. I don't think I could do it indie hacking style.

For this venture we  want to make a global impact and improve how people do Embedded Linux and IoT at large for a large number of companies and devices. This requires raising awareness of the BEAM, Erlang, Elixir as well as Nerves. It requires figuring out how to explain the particular benefits of LiveView. It requires showing the short time to prototype and the good long tail maintenance story.

I am really excited to spread Nerves. And with some further discussion I ended up agreeing to come on as a co-founder. As we secure some funding through some initial capital from interested parties I'll be able to put time and effort into both improving NervesHub, building out the few proprietary bits of NervesCloud (billing, enterprise auth, the regular stuff) and also making the wider Nerves story better. Formally my role is CTO with a strong dash of evangelism. Josh is CEO with a lot of product responsibilities.

Currently I will mix Underjord client work and NervesCloud startup work. Thankfully it all centers around Nerves so there is a lot of wins for my clients from NervesCloud efforts and it seems NervesCloud will benefit from my client's needs as well. My colleagues in Underjord continue to work on a mix of Nerves clients and other Elixir projects.

This could go for some time. We have a few likely customers lined up before we even open our doors so we'll offset the burn-rate with actual income, novel as that is. Then eventually we expect to raise some proper cash and at that point the plan is to have Underjord make up the initial development team. Underjord will remain a going concern but might be mostly busy on this particular partnership.

We are doing this in lively, active collaboration with Frank, Jon and the rest of the Nerves core team. The name of the company has Frank's blessing. Most of our work is happening in the open and it is all open source. Likely we will have some proprietary infrastructure, auth, back-office and such. My intent is very much that we don't end up running a forked NervesHub at any point. Beyond the core team we are actively connecting with companies that use or rely on Nerves as well as groups like Nerves JP to ensure that we harmonize our plans with the community.

Actually, if you do Nerves commercially and want to know what is going on, reach out. Let's chat :)

I've spent the last two months soaking in all these topics so I could go incredibly long in this post. I'll wrap it up here. I think Nerves is a strong enough set of opinions that it could do for IoT what Rails and Laravel do for web development. I think we can have a 5 minute web kiosk demo. IoT is a much more complex space than web apps and the work that Frank and the crew has put in is nothing short of incredible. If you enjoy Elixir, there is no place where you get to stretch your OTP concepts more readily than in Nerves.

I need to cut myself off here. Yeah. Doing a startup. Hope it takes off. Wish me luck.

Asterisk: If you are wondering about Peridio, the rebrand of nerves-hub.org and fork of NervesHub 1.x. I don't know what they are up to really and I prefer not to speculate. Their site doesn't mention Nerves anymore. I think it is safe to say they chose another direction. In terms of OTA updates they are definitely one of our competitors although I'm more concerned with Golioth, Particle and MemFault.

I'd love to hear what you are curious about around this startup voyage I'm going on and if you have any concerns. You can reach me on the Fediverse where I'm @lawik@fosstodon.org or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.

Thank you for reading this. I appreciate you.