Jan Rychter joined us to talk about building a company, electronic components, and software design.
Jan is the founder and engineer at PartsBox.com. If you are interested in the meta-analysis of the data, check out his article on the Top Ten Hobby Parts and the Electronic Component Database,
You can find out more about Jan through his website (jan.rychter.com), LinkedIn, or Mastodon.
We talked with John Taylor about his book, how to handle data, and the open/closed principle of software development.
John’s book is Patterns in the Machine. It was mentioned on Embedded Artistry and is part of their Design for Change course.
John also has a blog (PatternsInTheMachine.net) and a github repo that is a companion to his book, showing the PIM framework.
Professor Barbara Liskov spoke with us about the Liskov substitution principle, data abstraction, software crisis, and winning a Turing Award.
See Professor Liskov’s page at MIT, including her incredible CV.
Ethan Slattery joined us to talk about animals, animal trackers, and how they work.
Ethan works for Wildlife Computers. They use the Argos Network for data transfer. He was previously at MBARI and worked with Engineers for Exploration as an undergraduate.
Ethan is also known as CrustyAuklet on Twitter and Github. He also has an Instagram page.
Things mentioned in the show you might want to know more about:
Nautilus Live is a streaming YouTube channel from an ROV exploring the oceans. They have periodic dives where you can ask scientists about what they are seeing, while they are seeing it. Watch discoveries happen in real-time. Or watch the highlight reels on YouTube.
Ze Frank also has a YouTube channel about animals called True Facts that it is … not as scientifically minded. And sometimes NSFW. Start with the True Facts about the Ocotpus. (Note he did a parody of a Nautilus Live dive).
The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman
Penguin, pangolin, whale shark, weta, you might have heard about those but what about the cassowary? In-depth documentary video, people on the internet are idiots video, and Wikipedia.
Two of the big tracking databases :
Also, the Cornell Lab of ornithology also maintains a bird specific database that is pretty neat:
Chris Svec of iRobot and Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry join Christopher and Elecia to talk about the hows and whys of estimating software schedules..
The article that started the discussion was Agile Otter’s Platitudes of Doom.
You can participate in these sorts of discussions on the Embedded Slack Channel by supporting Embedded on Patreon.
On Phillip’s Embedded Artistry Website you can find a library of courses, hundreds of free articles, and even more member's only content. Their current focus is developing two new courses: Designing Embedded Software for Change and Abstractions and Interfaces. There are also many great posts on planning and estimation.
Ingo Muschenetz spoke with us about software, management, podcasts, and interacting with people.
Ingo’s LinkedIn page
Ingo works for Axway, they are hiring: Axway Careers
Ingo keeps up with many podcasts, here are some of his favorites:
Podcasts that talk about a complex topic, provide insight
Throughline
Planet Money
Indicator https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510325/the-indicator-from-planet-money
Freakonomics
Podcasts with interviews and discussions about lives and careers
Conan OBrian https://www.earwolf.com/show/conan-obrien
Andy Richter https://www.earwolf.com/show/the-three-questions-with-andy-richter/
Fresh Air
Podcasts that don’t fit into a category other than “interesting”:
99% invisible
20000 Hz
Podcasts that Ingo didn’t mention but meant to:
The Daily: https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-daily
Software Engineering Daily: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/
The Bugle: https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/
Switched on Pop: https://switchedonpop.com/
Gastropod: https://gastropod.com/
Liam Cadigan joined us to talk about founding a successful startup from a college capstone project. Liam is a co-founder of InspectAR and worked on the board files the system uses.
Liam can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Check out InspectAR. They are also on Twitter and on Instagram.
The Inventor's Dilemma: The Remarkable Life of H. Joseph Gerber
Professor Barbara Liskov spoke with us about the Liskov substitution principle, data abstraction, software crisis, and winning a Turing Award.
See Professor Liskov’s page at MIT, including her incredible CV.
George Stocker (@gortok) spoke with us about software, Jewelbots (@Jewelbots) and learning embedded systems to ship the product.
Elecia's book is Making Embedded Systems. George also recommended Getting Started with BLE and Programming Pearls.
The processor we talked about was the Nordic nRF51, a BLE system on a chip.
Elecia White and Phil King of Weekend Engineering talk about things a hardware engineer wants software engineers to know. Drifting a bit from topic to topic, they touch on interviewing, oscilloscopes, ways to light hardware on fire, why they work on projects at home and writing novels.
Some links from the show:
Phil works at Lytro making amazing cameras. Elecia and Phil have worked at Leapfrog and ShotSpotter together. Very different products.
Phil's oscilloscope (the one Elecia borrows) is a Tektronix DPO4034.
At Phil's instigation, Elecia wrote a space opera novel for NaNoWriNo a few years back. (If you contact us, you can have a PDF for free. But really, she wrote it in a month, what do you expect? Buy her real book to get the good stuff.)