509: Swarmed by Engineers

Steve Hinch wrote a book about engineering, innovation, and business. He shares decades of wisdom gleaned from his career at Hewlett-Packard and Agilent as an engineer, manager, marketing director, and general manager. 

Steve’s book is Winning through Innovation: Lessons from the Front Lines of Business. While mostly retired, Steve is an executive consultant, see his website to get in touch: Stephen W. Hinch.  

We also touched on some of Steve’s nature and hiking volumes as well.  While Elecia is reading My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir | Project Gutenberg, Steve suggested works by Edward Abbey might be of interest. 

Elecia and Steve both received copies of Bill Packard’s The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company while at HP.

Transcript

Mouser Electronics has a dedicated Empowering Innovation Together hub that covers the latest breakthroughs in tech. Their new series explores how AI is reshaping engineering—from design automation to rapid prototyping and predictive maintenance. You’ll find insightful articles, podcasts, and videos that showcase real-world applications across industries. If you’re ready to see how AI is powering the next generation of engineering, head over to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation.

423: Speaking of Aardvarks

Phillip Johnston joined us to talk about how engineering approaches can change over time. 

This conversation started with Phillip’s Embedded Artistry blog post How Our Approach to Abstract Interfaces Has Changed Over the Years. His new course is Designing Embedded Software for Change. 

Embedded Artistry has a Design Pattern Catalogue (though Elecia was looking at Software design patterns on Wikipedia during the podcast). https://github.com/embvm 

Phillip is working with Memfault on an ongoing embedded systems panel. The first topic they covered was observability metrics for IoT devices. There is a panel coming up on how to debug embedded devices in production.

Some reading that Phillip mentioned:

• Toward a New Model of Abstraction in Software Engineering by Gregor Kiczales

• A Procedure for Designing Abstract Interfaces for Device Interface Modules by Kathryn Heninger Britton, R. Alan Parker, David L. Parnas

• Designing Software for Ease of Extension and Contraction by  David L. Parnas (1979)

• Design Patterns for Embedded Systems in C: An Embedded Software Engineering Toolkit by Bruce Powel Douglass

• Best Paper Awards in Computer Science from Jeff Huang 

Creating a Circular Buffer in C and C++ - Embedded Artistry

Aardvark I2C/SPI Host Adapter - Total Phase 

Transcript

290: Rule of Thumbs (Repeat)

We spoke with Phillip Johnston (@mbeddedartistry) of Embedded Artistry about consulting, writing, and learning.

In the Embedded Artistry welcome page, there is a list of Phillip’s favorite articles as well as his most popular articles. Some of Phillip’s favorites include:

• Embedded Rules of Thumb

• Improving SW with 5 LW Processes

• Learning from the Boeing 737 MAX saga

We also talked about code reviews and some best practices.

The Embedded Artistry newsletter is a good way to keep up with embedded topics. You can subscribe to it at embeddedartistry.com/newsletter

What are condition variables?

373: Docker! Docker! Docker!

It’s another Elecia and Chris episode and this time we cover handling hourly work when the task doesn’t neatly divide into hours, using Docker (and Conda and Virtualenv) for development, growing the podcast, overdoing conference talks, and trying to find a new laptop. Phew!

The Embedded Online Conference is coming up the week of May 17th 2021, and Elecia’s talk will be Buried Treasure and Map Files (Note: the coupon code is still valid and mentioned early in the episode. Elecia will also put up a copy of her talk on YouTube after some time.)

290: Rule of Thumbs

We spoke with Phillip Johnston (@mbeddedartistry) of Embedded Artistry about consulting, writing, and learning.

In the Embedded Artistry welcome page, there is a list of Phillip’s favorite articles as well as his most popular articles. Some of Phillip’s favorites include:

• Embedded Rules of Thumb

• Improving SW with 5 LW Processes

• Learning from the Boeing 737 MAX saga

We also talked about code reviews and some best practices.

The Embedded Artistry newsletter is a good way to keep up with embedded topics. You can subscribe to it at embeddedartistry.com/newsletter

What are condition variables?

199: Petri Dishes of Doom

Chris and Elecia answer listener questions about contracting (and consulting).

Reminders: T-shirts! Hat contest! Digilent contest announced in #197! It all ends around May 18th so get your entries in now!

The original discussion was on episode 4: Are We Not Lawyers?

Elecia's salary to rate conversion can be found as a Google spreadsheet. 

150: Sad Country Song

Torie Charvez spoke with us about what it takes to start and run your own business in the US. We talked about starting your own consulting company, selling your latest gadget, and all of the bookkeeping, tax issues, and details involved.

Torie's company is Tax Goddess. The write-off publication she mentioned is on the IRS site is Chapter 8 of Publication 535.

Elecia mentioned her Snow White's Guide to Your First Stock Options.

4: Are we not lawyers?

Elecia and Chris (@stoneymonster) discuss why they chose to go into consulting and what they've learned while building Logical Elegance into the company it is.

SCORE is a great resource for small business, even consulting firms.  Also check your local small business administration (SBA) chapter.

Elecia's salary to rate conversion can be found as a Google spreadsheet. 

Chris suggests Crash plan and Backblaze for backing up your client specific virtual machines (and everything else!).

If you have specific requests, drop us a note via the contact link on embedded.fm or by emailing show@makingembeddedsystems.com