How building a portable escape room made me a better developer
summary
Built a portable IoT escape room for 5–10 year olds that uses battery-powered ESP devices as tiny web servers, an MQTT broker (mosquito on a Raspberry Pi) and a bridging strategy to RabbitMQ, with a process manager / saga to run an escape room run state machine. Key lessons: monitor by critical time not just queue length, keep aggregate roots small so devices stay autonomous, and use a process manager / saga orchestration to change difficulty. Five Simon Says devices, many hardware iterations, final run ~1h6m and repeatable.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:09Portable escape room
- 7:45Puzzle design
- 13:23IoT devices powering escape room
- 17:37Monitoring distributed systems
- 27:30Aggregate Roots and service boundaries
- 34:57State machines for flow
- 41:40MQTT limitations and bridges
- 46:37Building challenges
- 50:13Final results
- 52:40Q&A
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