I just heard from my friend Vincent Kok, who—amongst many other things—is the Community Manager of the Embedded System Professionals group over on Discord.

One of the things they’ve started doing is getting industry experts to provide free lectures on various topics for members of the Embedded System Professionals community (I was honored to have been asked to give the first such talk—I chose switch bounce and debounce as my topic).

Vincent tells me that they’ve since hosted a number of these talks, with the next one coming up on Tuesday 11 October 2022 (you might want to register before all of the good virtual seats are taken).

This new presentation is going to be on Toit. “What’s Toit?” I hear you cry. Well, as fate would have it, I wrote a column on this very topic (see It’s Time to Get Toit!). As I wrote in that column:

Do you recall the dark days when your web browser used to crash if you attempted to open one too many tabs? The founders of Toit fixed that problem by building the V8 Javascript engine for Google Chrome.

Are you a web developer? If so, do you remember when you had to write your application in three different languages in order for it to function on mobile, desktop, and web-based platforms? The founders from Toit fixed that problem by creating the Dart language, which was the fastest-growing programming language in 2019 because of its adoption by Flutter (Google’s UI toolkit for building applications).

Based on their virtual machine and programming language successes, these heroes and heroines — along with the rest of the ever-growing Toit team — have gone on to create Toit, which is a cloud-managed container platform for the IoT.

In a crunchy nutshell, Toit is an open-source language for the ESP32 family of chips. It enables building your firmware out of modular services that can be installed and upgraded on your ESP32 in a couple of seconds via Wi-Fi without needing to reboot the device. The services run isolated from each other and communicate through an efficient remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism that allows separating complex drivers (like the ones for cellular modems) completely from your own code.

The presenter will be Kasper Lund, who is a programming languages and virtual machine veteran. As far as I’m concerned, this webinar will be a “must see” event. The fact that it’s 100% free is the equivalent of a great big dollop of whipped cream on top of a large slice of chocolate cake (dang, now I’ve made myself hungry).