carterpape.com / the-blog

how IoT began

I have been doing freelancing through Upwork recently. Upwork is a platform for businesses to hire independent contractors for a huge variety of jobs, from filling out spreadsheets to designing brands. I’ve done a variety of jobs through the site, but most of them have been ghostwriting for the company DO Supply. They recently gave me permission to share some of the work I have done for them on my site, so I’ve selected one of the better articles to share.

My friend Daniel Browning, who worked for DO Supply this summer, originally contacted me about this opportunity and is credited as the author on some of the articles I have written for his company.

Most of the articles I write for DO Supply are produced in around half a workday. I recently accepted a contract to write a 1,500-word overview of the programming language Nim and completed the assignment within 24 hours of learning about it. The article ended up being one of my better freelance writing samples, and I will link to it on the blog once it is published.

My writing for DO Supply concerns many technical subjects, usually concentrated on whatever is popular or hype at the moment. Here, I will share the second best1 article I have written for DO Supply, along with what inspired the article in the first place.

IoT Started with a Vending Machine

This was one of my favorite freelance articles to write; researching for the article was interesting, and the idea of doing an historical overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) was mine. It is written in a dually historical and technical perspective, which also made it unique.2

Ashton put a lot of stock in RFID at the time, and even as late as 2009 was writing about the promises the technology offered. However, IoT seems to be turning away from RFID technology, foregoing RFID-tagged objects in favor of objects that are computers unto themselves.

— from IoT Started with a Vending Machine, an article I wrote for DO Supply about the history of IoT

For this article, Daniel originally asked that I write on the topic of IoT but gave me leeway to decide the specifics of how I would write about it. I did preliminary research on what IoT is, who is developing the technology, and where it is going. After this search, I decided that one of the more interesting parts of the IoT story was its history.

You can read the full article, nicely formatted and all, on the website Machine Design. You’ll notice numerous typos in the article; I have informed the appropriate parties that fixes are needed.

  1. The aforementioned article about Nim is my best work for DO Supply so far, but as I said, it is not yet published. ⤴︎

  2. I’ll note that this article, and the others like it that I have written, are far from journalism. I did not talk to any human sources for the story, and very little of the information shared is new or novelly presented. ⤴︎