When I first started consulting ten years ago, there was an online, team-oriented video game called League of Legends that I used to play after work or during lunch. The game required some strategy, required implementing that strategy through tactics and also required some well-coordinated button smashing to be effective in team fights. Over the … Continue reading 5 Engineering Lessons from Playing League of Legends
Category: Design Cycle
7 Sections Every Company Coding Standard Should Include
Developing a company coding standard is absolutely critical to ensuring that every embedded developer is on the same page. A coding standard tells a developer many of the do’s and don’ts that they need in order to write legible, reviewable software that achieves the businesses desired quality level with the least number of defects possible. … Continue reading 7 Sections Every Company Coding Standard Should Include
2 Techniques to Version Embedded Hardware
When it comes to embedded systems version control, I often immediately jump to thinking about the software. Software changes often and carefully managing those changes are crucial, but so is versioning the hardware. A small hardware change could obsolesce every version of software up to that hardware change. In todays’ post, we are going to … Continue reading 2 Techniques to Version Embedded Hardware
7 Tips for Getting to Market Faster
Everyone is in a hurry these days and embedded system developers are no exception. Development teams are racing as quickly as possible towards a goal or a delivery that isn’t just a moving target but may not exist at all! Fire! Ready, aim goes the mantra but what about teams that have a known goal, … Continue reading 7 Tips for Getting to Market Faster
7 Reasons Open Source Software can be Evil
Through-out my travels, I encounter quite a few development teams that seem to live by the adage, “The best software is free software”. The moment they hear the words “Open Source” the heavens open, the choirs begin singing and all thought about doing due diligence on the open source code is gone. That’s the direction, … Continue reading 7 Reasons Open Source Software can be Evil
5 Tips for Setting Realistic Project Expectations
Quite a few companies and teams that I encounter have an expectations problem. They have unrealistic expectations for the time and effort that it takes to develop an embedded system. On the spectrum between pessimistic and optimistic, they typically blow past optimistic into the fantasy land zone. The result is often debilitating, stressful, late and … Continue reading 5 Tips for Setting Realistic Project Expectations
The Top 5 Causes for Project Fatigue
Project fatigue can have a crippling effect on the project development cycle. A project starts and the development team is energized and dive in with positive fervor, but before long, the project stalls and seems to be going nowhere fast. There are dozens of potential causes for project fatigue, but in my experience, there are … Continue reading The Top 5 Causes for Project Fatigue
The Silent Firmware Revolution
Moore’s law is well known in the electronics industry; it states that the number of transistors roughly doubles every two years. Since 1965 Moore’s law has proven to be true and the capabilities of digital electronics has enjoyed an exponential growth in capability. The embedded systems industry has greatly benefited from the growth in capabilities … Continue reading The Silent Firmware Revolution
The Key Factor Being Ignored by IoT Developers
If you’ve been paying attention to the progress being made on the IoT, you’ve heard about the billions of IoT devices that are currently connected and the fact that in the next decade, experts expect to see over a trillion devices connected. A trillion devices. That is just mind boggling especially considering that standards are … Continue reading The Key Factor Being Ignored by IoT Developers
An Ingenious Arduino to Breadboard Adapter
When I work on a development project, I’ve become a big fan of using development boards that have the Arduino headers on them. The vast number of shields that easily connect to these headers is phenomenal. The one problem that I’ve always had though was that there is always a need to use a breadboard … Continue reading An Ingenious Arduino to Breadboard Adapter