Hello and thanks for visiting my personal blog. I’m Martin, I live in Sofia, Bulgaria and manage software engineering teams for a living. I started this blog back in 2012 to document, share and show off the hobby projects I work on in my free time.
It all started with a heat pump. I had hacked a Daikin split unit to heat water and wanted to know how well it was doing. So I built an energy monitor, then a wireless sensor to go with it, then a smaller one running on a coin cell.
In 2016, a few of us started proSmart to make connected thermostats. That is where I learned the parts of IoT a hobby project never teaches you: per-device certificates, provisioning and revocation, firmware updates that survive a bad connection, and a device that sets itself up in five minutes for someone who will never read the manual. We were also one of the winners of a national small-business award that year, presented by the President of Bulgaria, Rosen Plevneliev.
I stopped writing production code at work a long time ago, so this site is where I keep my hands dirty.
These days, the project is the house itself – rooftop PV, a heat pump, Home Assistant with a lot of custom glue, a small VPS for the things I don’t want to rent, and, lately, AI agents doing chores for me. When something breaks, I write it up, including the embarrassing part.
Some of the talks I have given over the years were an IoT startup talk at ISTA 2016, securing MQTT with mutual TLS at IoT Bulgaria Summit 2019, and two at DEV.BG, about my ESP32 control hub and about our heat pump, PV and Home Assistant.
I have been to 40-odd countries, most of them for work.
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