I work for a successful IoT company and my advice is: don't. State of the art in home automation is: impossibly insecure & rarely helpful. The so-called "smart"

I work for a successful IoT company and my advice is: don't. State of the art in home automation is: impossibly insecure & rarely helpful. The so-called "smart" home is anything but smart; it takes lots of manual configuration to make it perform as intelligently as you'd wish (and if you have a knack for coding, you'll end up reimplementing your vendor's hideously expensive "smart home hub" that was supposed to do the work for you). The industry is simply too young and immature. Speaking of security: You have no bloody idea how easy it is for anyone with some crypto/security background to break into an IoT appliance or its vendor's cloud services. In the era where an average web development Joe knows a lot about SSL certs, CSRF, XSS and all that stuff, the average embedded developer's idea of encryption is AES in ECB mode (but not too many bits - "our MCU won't handle that!").