The Internet of Things has a problem: less knowledge on designing and programing secure and privacy respecting products. Developers and vendors often failing, because they fail on solving frequent tasks, which are recurring challenges for many IoT projects and products.

In 1960’s in the book “A Pattern Languages” by Architect Christopher Alexander described the principle of design patterns to solve recurring challenges in building designs. Alexander has been inspirited by “Software Patterns” and his book has become a milestone for generation of architects. A pattern describes the parameters of a regular design problem and a best practice way of a recurring solution. A complex problem can be stripped down to single patterns with best practice principles to solve.

We think, that a Pattern Language is a helpful methodology to solve the current mess in the Internet of Thing: bad and unsecure products by design. Our approach is not “writing a book” – it’s our approach to collect recurring challenges in IoT software and hardware design and give them back to the developer’s community in an online Wiki.

This Wiki format allows IoT developers to search a design “challenge” – for example how to design setup Blue Tooth Low Energy connection in a secure way and giving a practical example.

We have started working on the pattern language now, together with Students of the University Heilbronn. The Version 1.0 will be published end of June by Creative Common License.

If you like what we are doing, you are introduced to support the building and creation of the pattern language. Just drop me a message on Twitter: @mirko_ross or LinkendIn: Mirko Ross