Merge pull request #1 from redwirelabs/home

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-The Redwire Labs guide for developing commercial products with [Nerves](https://nerves-project.org/).
+This is a guide to developing commercial products with [Nerves](https://nerves-project.org/)
+based on the lessons learned by the team at [Redwire Labs](https://www.redwirelabs.com/).
+Product development can be a challenging journey, so we are sharing this
+resource with the community so that you can avoid the pitfalls we have seen
+and shortcut the path to success.
+
+*Redwire Labs is a product development agency that specializes in commercial
+IoT products built with Nerves and Elixir.*
+
+## Why we use Nerves
+
+In our experience, Nerves has been an excellent technology that expedites the
+development of connected products, and is built on a platform that supports
+robustness and reliability.
+
+Nerves is the framework for running an [Elixir](https://elixir-lang.org/)
+application on embedded Linux. It uses [Buildroot](http://buildroot.org/) to
+create a custom Linux system that's tailored to your project and boots the
+system into the application (as process 1), opposed to running a Linux distro,
+which tends to be heavier weight and comes with extra cruft. Nerves also
+provides facilities to update firmware in the field, and an A/B partition scheme
+that allows for rolling back in the case of a failed firmware update.
+
+Elixir is used as the main application programming language. From a firmware
+development perspective, this allows developers to reason about the system at a
+higher level, avoiding the need to worry about things like memory management and
+segmentation faults. However, developers still have the low-level tools they
+need to interface with hardware, like bitwise operations. From the perspective
+of developing a connected product, Elixir is a language that can be used for
+both the firmware and backend server, making it easier for developers to
+understand each side of the system. Our full stack engineers are even able to
+develop features in vertical slices through the firmware and backend codebases.
+
+The [BEAM VM](https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/erlangs-virtual-machine-the-beam/)
+runs the Elixir application, and is known for its use in developing low-latency,
+distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. It also comes with [OTP](https://www.erlang.org/doc/),
+which can be thought of as the standard library. OTP provides much more
+functionality out of the box than most other languages, like [state machines](https://www.erlang.org/doc/man/gen_statem),
+[directed graphs](https://www.erlang.org/doc/man/digraph), and [ETS tables](https://www.erlang.org/doc/man/ets)
+(in-memory database).