531: Sequestering the Mess
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Elecia and Christopher celebrate winning the IEEE Educational Activities Board Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education! A huge thank you to Mark Omo and the wonderful listeners who submitted nomination letters. Chris and Elecia talk about learning Hungarian to qualify Chris for an EU passport. They also cover Cory Doctorow's new book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, smart ways to hand off codebases, and the most valuable skills they’ve relied on through their engineering careers. DISCUSSION RESOURCES & LINKS AWARDS & MILESTONES: Meritorious...
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530: A Living Highlighter
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Marine biologist Dr. Steven Haddock joins the show to share the alien, glowing, and transparent wonders of the deep ocean. We discuss his beautiful new book, The Radiant Sea, and explore the complex engineering and high-sensitivity optics required to capture living deep-sea creatures. Steve walks us through the evolutionary logic of biological light, how vantablack organisms trap photons in the dark, the horizontal sun-compass navigation of jellyfish blooms, and what it’s like to play games underwater with giant Pacific octopuses and jumbo squids. Dr. Steven Haddock is a Senior Scientist at...
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529: The Narwhal Looked Amazing
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Chris Svec returns to the show to discuss the messy, non-linear realities of engineering management and onboarding new college graduates. We explore why companies should bother hiring fresh grads in the first place, how to prevent junior developers from going dark when they get stuck, and why admitting ignorance publicly is an absolute workplace superpower. Along the way, we dive into managing genius firmware engineering hires, battling technical debt and software entropy, and why your development team shouldn't communicate solely through pull request comments. Chris Svec is the Director of...
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528: Goldfish Chunks
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Tyler Hoffman returns to the show to discuss diagnostics and observability data in embedded systems. We catch up on his life after startup acquisition, explore the hows and whys of keeping product data separate from operational data, and consider the realities of fleet management at scale. Tyler is the co-founder of . Memfault was acquired by Nordic Semiconductor about a year ago. While Nordic has as a smaller scale solution for Nordic devices (~100 devices), Memfault will continue to maintain support for non-Nordic platforms as well. During the discussion, Tyler advocates for a...
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527: At The Jellyfish Conference
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Chris and Elecia talk about pushing out of their comfort zone, networking advice, adding STARs and action verbs to resumes, using rust, thermo forming plastics, soldering together audio gear, and winning awards. If you are looking for an update to your resume or are interviewing for a new job and you haven’t heard of the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result), it is a good way to formulate what you’ve done in a way that helps people see your impact. The that includes how to take your current, boring “did the task” resume bullet point and move it into STAR format and then...
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526: Take A Taste Of Engineers
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Dr. Victoria Serrano spoke with us about STEM outreach, fostering curiosity, and inspiring students with engineering education. Victoria is a professor at the Technological University of Panama (her faculty page: ). Her youtube channel is which talks about circuits, electronics, and robotics. The channel goes along with her website which shows the types of courses and outreach she does with Arduino UNOs and other low cost equipment. Victoria is also a Fulbright Scholar, an IEEE STEM Champion 2023, and Honorable Mention IEEE Rising Stars Conference 2024. She also received the IEEE EAB...
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525: Some Sort of Metal
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Dr. Tom Williams spoke with us about robots, ethics, teaching, and books. Then we talked about mines, umpires, water, and more books. Tom is the author of (free at MIT Press: !). As part of the discussion, we talked about some other books and media: Nonfiction: by Ayanna Howard (Embedded episodes and ) by Philip Koopman (related Embedded episode ) by Kate Crawford Waki Kamino’s research on robot umpires: (or see the summary in the Cornell Chronicle: ) Fiction: by Becky Chalmers by Martha Wells (Embedded episode ) by Nnedi Okorafor was...
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524: This Isn't a Movie
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Nathan Jones spoke with us about hardware security, motivation, conference talks, and writing. Nathan wrote an in-depth series of posts about the benefits of superloops vs RTOS: , , , and . He also wrote about and which discusses the . See his and . And Nathan’s excellent Github repo. Nathan recommends by Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn. It is an excellent resource on embedded security. We spoke with Jasper about the book in and with Colin about the Chip Whisperer in . The has specific features that are required to be implemented by all devices that want the safety CE label....
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523: Bad Experience With Donuts
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Chris and Elecia chat about Leapfrog toys, things they like, large company politics, awards, and open source governance. The with LilyPad toy which is suspiciously similar to the tablet. Which is different from the which had cartridges and capacitive touch (capacitive touch was used on the as well… the ). Why does Elecia want an award? Who knows? But right now, she’s getting ready for a listener to nominate the show (Chris and Elecia) for IEEE’s . Probably. But we’ve got nominators and endorsers so that’s mostly sorted. She also signed Embedded up for the Women Podcasters...
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522: The Information Is In Poop
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Sonia Grego speaks with us about a topic no one likes to talk about, but could be used to monitor personal dietary health and widespread disease outbreaks. Toilets! Sonia leads Duke University’s Smart Toilet Lab and the spin out Coprata which makes the Microbiome Activity Tracker. As discussed in the show, when developing a project far from where it will be deployed, there are many common issues. The chapter of Sonia’s recent book gives an excellent introduction to the unexpected environment far from the comfort of desks. The book is (free online!) , See , the as...
info_outlineJason Turner of C++ Weekly and Empty Crate spoke with us about the joy of puzzles, the changing directions of an interesting career, and the C++ programming language. I mean, of course we talked about C++. But only a little.
Jason recently published Programming Puzzles Big Book: 400 pages of fun for ages 7-99, a book of puzzles for the logically minded. It teaches programming concepts as engaging puzzles: recursion, binary, assembly, Lisp, regular expressions. You may not know what you are learning but you’ll likely find you know a lot more about how computers work afterward.
For the puzzles, paper is better than electronic. But you can also get the electronic version on LeanPub (which is better if you like to get lost in Wikipedia links).
This is not Jason’s first puzzle book, he’s made them for C++ Object Lifetime and Copy and Reference (see his Amazon and LeanPub author page for other books as well).
If you want to catch up on C++, check out C++ Weekly With Jason Turner - YouTube. Note the playlists are useful if you are looking for a deep dive on a particular topic.
If you want to get more out of C++ in your organization, Jason’s consulting company is Empty Crate. His contact page is there as well (or look for lefticus on most social media platforms).
If you’re interested in how 3D printing is changing design engineering, Mouser Electronics has some great resources to check out. Their Empowering Innovation Together platform is taking a deep dive into additive manufacturing—covering smarter production, faster prototyping, and breakthrough materials that move ideas beyond prototypes into real-world products. You’ll find podcasts, expert articles, and videos that keep you informed and inspired. Sound like your thing? Head to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation and explore.