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), a theme 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 the concept of computing that goes beyond the individual device and is instead embedded into the fabric of everyday life. 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].

As I was digging into the history of ubiquitous computing, I fell in love with Mark Weiser's The Computer for the 21st Century and was glad to find out that ETH had made its own contribution to the field, thanks to Prof. Friedemann Mattern and his lab.

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, a line of research that started at ETH thanks to, among others, Dominique Guinard and Simon Mayer (both of whom I eventually worked with).

As I learned more about the Web of Things, 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.

Gap semester and EVRYTHNG

I enjoyed working on this project and learning about the Web of Things so much that I decided to take a gap semester and dive deeper into it. Reading Building the Web of Things, written by Dominique Guinard, made me realize that the same principles that turned computers of different kinds into a seamless web of information could be applied to IoT devices to make them seamlessly interoperable. I had spent a lot of time tinkering with IoT and smart home devices, and I knew that interoperability was actually a big problem.

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