The study of distributed systems led me to learning the fundamentals of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The latter, in particular, had a strong influence on me: bringing together networking and hypermedia to tie together all the world's information systems was such a fascinating idea — one that completely changed the world.

The Web and its history

Beyond studying these systems in class, I became fascinated by the history behind them, thanks to books like Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Weaving the Web, written by Tim Berners-Lee himself. I had been following Tim Berners-Lee since he presented the Solid project back in 2019 at Campus Party in Milan, where I had been sleeping in a tent with some friends for three days.

The fact that information of all kinds, hosted on different computers all around the world, could be accessed in a seamless way with a web browser was mind-blowing. Even more interesting was the fact that technology could not only allow individuals to truly own their money (thanks to Bitcoin), but also own their "digital self" (thanks to Solid — or so I thought) — the half of digital sovereignty that would come back years later when I founded Fabric.

Ubiquitous computing

Another huge source of inspiration came from attending the Ubiquitous Computing class taught by Christian Holz. This is how I first came across ubiquitous computing as an idea with a name and a history, rather than something I had been building towards by accident. Thanks to this class, I learned how many insights can be extrapolated from the data of simple IoT sensors [link to a project to come].

Finding the Web of Things

While researching potential semester projects to work on (as required by my curriculum), I found out about the perfect intersection between the Web, IoT, and ubiquitous computing: the Web of Things. Two of the people behind it, Dominique Guinard and Simon Mayer, I eventually worked with.

As I learned more about it, I decided that it would be a great topic for my semester project. That's how I ended up in Simon Mayer's Interactions Lab — Simon, after finishing his PhD at ETH, had moved to the University of St. Gallen.

The semester project

During my semester project, I built a system that used data from various IoT sensors to learn a user's preferences, and then controlled other IoT devices to personalize the environment accordingly — the project Learning from interactions.

Internship at EVRYTHNG

I enjoyed working on this project and learning about the Web of Things so much that I decided to dive deeper into it, starting with Building the Web of Things, written by Dominique Guinard.

I thought that spontaneously reaching out to Dominique might lead to something — and so I did. Luckily enough, he offered me an internship at his company, EVRYTHNG [link to come], a pioneer in the commercialization of IoT in industry.

[More on the internship to come.]

The Web of Things everywhere

After the internship, everything I was thinking about was making devices seamlessly interoperable via the Web. Even friends' birthday presents turned into an excuse to build something using the Web of Things — like this computer mouse that would move itself every once in a while to keep a friend's Slack always on (she wasn't enjoying her job much lately).

Next: Master's thesis at DISCO