I was asked to be a guest in Betatalks the Podcast, and I like sharing knowledge on security and home automation, so I taught why not.

Beware, spoilers ahead. First listen to the episode then read this post.

Microsoft has this great api where you can control almost everything in the Microsoft 365 cloud. To speed up your requests, you can combine up to 20 requests in a batch. This post will explain how to use batching and how it got implemented in the Graph SDK for DOTNET.

Arstechnica published an article yesterday, called “Appliance makers sad that 50% of customers won’t connect smart appliances”. Let me tell you, I’m glad people don’t connect their oven to the internet. We own two of these smart appliances from AEG and I disconnected them as soon as I discovered what they do.

Home automation is a topic that speaks to the imagination for most of us. Rooms that light up if you enter them, a notification on your phone when someone rings the doorbell. These thing tickled my personal interest years ago. Back then nobody was doing these kinds of things and as a developer I was intrigued.

If you talk about Home Automation in 2023 you’re probably also talking about Home Assistant, if you’ve never heard about that. Go on check their website, it’s awesome. Open-source mostly local home automation with, “components” or “integrations” (they mix these terms, don’t know why) for thousands of devices. Out-of-the-box you have support for a lot of devices, but because it’s open-source you can easily add your own custom components. Home Assistant started as an applciation you would run on a simple raspberry pi you had laying around, recently more and more people are switching to a slightly more powerful system because the pi is no longer sufficient for their needs.