Welcome to Building for the Home!
By Nik
Welcome. We’re engineers at Nest, focused on creating a home that takes care of the people inside and the world around it. We call it the Thoughtful Home. Thanks for being here!
We’re excited to kick off this dialog. To give you a peek behind the scenes at Nest. Share our stories. Our lessons learned. And to give details on the technologies that make things tick.
I’m Nik and I head up this amazing group of engineers. At Nest, we are passionate about the idea of reinventing products in the home that could be so much better, smarter and more helpful with the right technology and a great user experience. If you stopped by my house, you’d see several different connected ‘things’ in every single room. Unfortunately, while each device does a nice job, not everything works well together yet — so my family is on this journey with me!
Our team members come from a variety of backgrounds and most have been building consumer products for a long time. But building for the home is a lot harder than it looks. Because our products are part of the infrastructure of the house, the expectations are higher: low latency, high reliability, easy to set up and use, tight security, and a really long lifetime.
Making a product that meets those requirements — and still looks great in your home — compounds the challenges. For example, the Nest Thermostat’s ambient temperature sensor sits next to a heat-producing chip while encased in steel and glass. Or, the Nest Protect’s passive infrared motion sensor needs to live inside the big button, which then becomes both a button and a PIR lens.
Our incredible engineers solve these and other interesting problems every day. And in spite of the challenges, we have had a lot of success at building products that are easy to use, beautiful and impactful on the comfort, safety, security, and energy savings of people’s homes.
Products are only half the story. We’re not going to make every device in the house but we do want to enable many different kinds of products to take part in our vision of a thoughtful home. We’re building a platform to extend the technology that underpins Nest products to developers. We’ve tested and approved hundreds of product integrations and worked with thousands of developers, from startups to large companies, who are part of our Works with Nest community. We’re uniquely positioned to share what we have learned about designing and building products that you choose to bring into your home.
For our first post here on Medium, we’re sharing details about Sightline, a new feature of Nest Cam. We’ll have many more things to share over the coming months. We’re looking forward to your participation and feedback. Come join us at Nest’s Developer community to get involved in the conversation. Thanks for reading.
Join the conversation at Nest’s Developer community. Get started with Nest Developers. Or explore careers with Nest.
The information contained in this blog is provided only as general information for educational purposes, and may or may not be up to date. The information is provided as-is with no warranties. This blog is not intended to be a factual representation of how Nest’s products and services actually work. No license is granted under any intellectual property rights of Nest, Google, or others.
