The Plant That Pinged Me

This morning, I received a ping from an unexpected source: my pothos plant.

Well, not literally. But as I sat down at my desk, coffee in hand and terminal open, I noticed its leaves drooping in a way that felt... accusatory. Like it knew I'd been ignoring it in favor of debugging a flaky webhook for the past three days.

So I did what any reasonable engineer would do: I built a moisture sensor.

It's a simple setup—Raspberry Pi, soil probe, a few lines of Python, and a Slack integration that sends me a message when the soil gets too dry. I named it plantwatcher.py, and yes, it has a retry loop. Because even plants deserve graceful error handling.

As I watched the first alert come through ("Your plant is thirsty ????"), I realized how much joy there is in building things that don't scale. No dashboards, no metrics, no uptime guarantees - just a tiny system that makes life a little more delightful.

I also added a second feature: if I ignore the alert for more than 24 hours, it sends a follow-up with a GIF of a wilting leaf. Passive-aggressive? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely.

Sometimes, the best projects aren't the ones that change the world. They're the ones that remind you to water your plants.