Experience

MaibornWolff · Client work

Smart-home appliance cloud

Voice, app and energy features for connected household appliances.

Details anonymised · figures describe my own work

Overview

A cloud platform that connects household appliances (washers, dryers, dishwashers, ovens, coffee makers) to a mobile app, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, third-party APIs and home energy-management systems. I work as a lead backend engineer on the voice and third-party integrations.

The problem

Each appliance type and firmware generation supports different capabilities, and every channel (voice assistants, third-party apps, energy systems) has to expose the right ones without hard-coding device lists in each service.

The approach

Capability-driven Java microservices: a shared filter library decides per appliance what each intent or API may offer, with remotely versioned configuration, and a shared device-control library carries command sequences across the voice and third-party services. Every feature ships with unit, flow and feature tests through GitLab CI to Kubernetes.

Highlights

  1. Per-program energy-consumption monitoring for washers, dryers and dishwashers
  2. A capability-based intent filter that replaced hard-coded device lists
  3. A "No program selected" mode for 7 appliance types in 9 locales
  4. A stop-program notification shared by the voice and third-party channels
  5. Validation and clear error semantics for the energy-management API