One of the few perks of having to travel is the chance to read books (remember those?) from cover to cover in one go. I recently had the chance to read The Maker Manifesto from Mark Hatch, the CEO of Techshops. It is one of those rare books which make you want to jump up and start ‘making’ something (not a good idea in an airplane I admit). But more about this in a minute.

I have been struggling lately with the overbearing IoT coverage and hype. All the ingenuity and potential seems to become increasingly directed towards creating yet another platform for advertisement. Most if not all IoT presentations start out by citing the same one or two studies talking about billions of devices and trillions of dollars just beyond the horizon (I call it the (x+1) syndrom - it is always one year out). This is usually followed by promises about how this or that gadget/protocol/framework/alliance (choose your preferred) is going to liberate us from our earthly burdens like switching on lights or turning on the coffee maker.

Ofcourse everything is open for debate but I personally prefer my simple wall mounted light switch over having to pull out my smart phone and tap on an app.

In these challenging moments it is refereshing to remind myself what has drawn my interest to the Internet of Things in the first place. For me the Internet of Things is simply a term describing something much deeper and more fundamental shift in society. And this shift - or rather the anticipation of this shift - is being called Internet of Things in the IT circles, Industrial Internet by GE, the 4th Industrial Revolution (aka Industry 4.0) in Germany, Artisan Entrepreneur by the Economist and the already mentioned Maker Movement.

The common theme across all of these manifestations is the unprecedented democratization of the means of production (yes, in Marx’s sense as Mark Hatch writes). Think about it - the cloud commoditzed and democratized access to compute and storage resources the same way as 3D printing is currently doing for manufacturing and crowdfunding sites are doing for financing. We are seeing a re-emergence of traditional manufacturing clusters like Northern Italy (Arduino) and the UK (Raspberry Pi). I believe that we are about to witness how all those quantitative changes will lead to a change in quality on how ‘things are made’ in our societies (this was first formulated by Hegel - I struggled a bit to find a non too obvious Marxist reference but this article provides an excellent explanation and is in itself a fascinated read).

To catch a glimpse of the future look no further than Etsy. Etsy has made a billion Dollar plus buisness from selling individually made crafts. Their engineerig blog is one of the finest and I love their mantra ‘Code as Craft’.

Which brings me back to the book ‘The Maker Manifesto’. While Mark is coming at it from a Maker perspective, someone could (and maybe should) have written a very similar book from a Software perspective. Cloud IT, HTML5, Javascript, Node.js, RPi and Arduino, Github - these are the tools for the coming Software Maker revolution. Both books would meet where our ability to create, to make is only limited by our imagination. And where once again individual creativity and craftmanship will have access to the tools and means to provide viable alternatives to industrial-scale production.

And where are APIs in this you might wonder. Well - if the Cloud is about the commoditization of IT then APIs are about democratizing access. APIs are glue which binds them all and brings it together and makes it work as one.