Working on hardware cybersecurity remotely, from Boston, MA.
Also building and running www.fpgajobs.com - a job board for digital logic designers.
- cushychickenI think there’s a lot of people out there who don’t want to believe written communication skills like these are as important as raw technical skill.
- It’s the “embedded” part that people struggle with.
I can find systemd script gremlins all the live long day.
I can’t find anyone who can write device drivers for custom peripherals, then hook them to user space utilities in a sane way.
- And embedded Linux!
I’ve had a hell of a time finding good embedded Linux devs.
I got insanely lucky to hire two this year.
- Didn’t everyone kind of migrate to more capable chips like ESP32 and STM32 in the intervening decade since Arduino got big and commercial?
- I for one really like developing and co-managing specs with an LLM.
I think it’s a great conversational tool for evaluating and shaking out weak points in a design at an early phase.
- >The difference is purely in how much spec you write before you start implementing.
Ah, and therein lies the problem.
I’ve seen companies frequently elect “none at all” as the right amount of spec to write.
I’d rather have far too many specs than none.
- Waterfall gets an unnecessarily bad rap.
Nobody who delivers any system professionally thinks it’s a bad thing to plan out and codify every piece of the problem you’re trying to solve.
That’s part of what waterfall advocates for. Write a spec, and decompose to tasks until you can implement each piece in code.
Where the model breaks - and what software developers rightly hate - is unnecessarily rigid specifications.
If your project’s acceptance criteria are bound by a spec that has tasked you with the impossible, while simultaneously being impossible to change, then you, the dev, are screwed. This is doubly true in cases where you might not get to implementing the spec until months after the spec has been written - in which case, the spec has calcified into something immutable in stakeholders’ minds.
Agile is frequently used by weak product people and lousy project managers as an excuse to “figure it out when we get there”. It puts off any kind of strategic planning or decision making until the last possible second.
I’ve lost track of the number of times that this has caused rework in projects I’ve worked on.
- Oh my god I fucking HATE the SPI config bus on the ice40 series
So difficult to get the directionality right and also enable a JTAG bus
Hate these parts for that reason
- Oh wow, Greg Gianforte managed to do something in politics I don’t vehemently hate.
He’s not a very nice person but he did at least used to own a tech company.
- OP is making comments about poor performance single cycle of a sigma delta ADC.
Single cycle readings defeat the point of sigma delta ADC setups.
You're taking many high noise samples and averaging them over time to get a better picture of the average voltage.
- This is cool. A hundred prototypes in eight weeks is no mean feat.
Y’all made a lot of smart choices to keep your timetable. Not least of which was finding - and listening to - a good CM partner.
- This is awesome.
I suspect that for every one job the government would subsidize for a daycare professional, that we’d see three women enter the workforce.
That’s a net of four people employed.
I have no proof of this aside from my own experience watching parents struggle to find care for their kids. Even well off ones where I live. In Massachusetts!
Good for you, New Mexico. I’m rooting for you.
- That’s a slippery slope argument.
Plenty of employers do not operate with this expectation. In the US, I’d replace “plenty” with “most”.
Plenty of employers recognize an opportunity to differentiate themselves to candidates by publicly not being 996’ers.
- I actually kind of like when companies are upfront about 996 expectations.
The transparency makes it that much easier to avoid them.
- Is it really surprising that DEF CON went where the money was?
Most cybersecurity work in the US, by volume, rolls up to one of about five organizations - all of whom are US government entities.
Most cybersecurity work has nothing to do with keeping Russian bot farms out of outdated WordPress installs.
- Unrestrained onions in command module.
- Homeboy deserved someone to weep for him at least a little bit.
Not so much the fact that he was gone - the fact that he was here.
Jim Lovell made us all better just for existing.
- They certainly do withhold information. See my other comment for my speculation as to why.
I suspect it has nothing to do with the OSSW community; they give their software tools away.
- > The vendor tools ARE leagues better than the open source alternatives, but it doesn't mean the open source stuff is just for toy projects
It’s not a question of developer experience. We heartily agree that using Vivado sucks. My point is that there’s no way around using Vivado (or the Altera equivalent) if you want to use the most useful parts of modern FPGAs.
It’s simply not possible to do things like access the GTH transceivers or custom MAC blocks using open source FPGA tools. These are table stakes capabilities to make these chips useful. You can only use vendor tools to access them.
I suspect - but cannot prove - that Xilinx has agreements with IP vendors about how much they are allowed to reveal about the guts of the different devices they integrate into Zynq family die.
I also suspect that Xilinx has considerable intellectual property investment into the underlying architecture of their PL. Making 600MHz programmable fabric is no mean technical feat. Open sourcing their tools is probably something they judge a risk to revealing those technical advantages.