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...
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521: Are You The Tiny Domino?
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Kenneth Finnegan entertained us with stories about accidentally contributing to the internet’s ability to network. Wondering how the internet works? All those terms about IPv4, IPv6, BGP, OSPF, CDN and other alphabet soup? Check out the YouTube videos by . Kenneth writes about his adventures on his blog, . Some of the posts related to this show are: We also mention FCIX aka or the You can also find Kenneth at where you will find more about half-dollars, nickels, and trains. If you also secretly long to run a locomotive, take a look at the program at WPRM. The title is...
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520: All Sorts of Interesting Facts About Teeth
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Chris and Elecia apologize, discuss uses and abuses of chatbots, reach out to an uncertain manager, try to help someone out of their professor’s draconian rules, and extol the joys of reading. is in Oakland, CA, US. It is wonderful! Some suggestions for UncertainManager: Hang in there! You are probably doing better than you think. Audio books are great! In the US, many libraries have digital libraries with extensive audio collections. There are several apps with different catalogs for the same library Libby, Kanopy, Hoopla, and Palace (check out the California shelf at...
info_outlineTyler 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. Memfault was acquired by Nordic Semiconductor about a year ago. While Nordic has nRF Cloud 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 "device-in-control" philosophy, emphasizing that edge devices should retain the intelligence to manage their own firmware updates and telemetry. We also discuss the practical constraints of remote fleet debugging, outlining why tools built for high-bandwidth web infrastructure will quickly bankrupt an IoT company, and identifying exactly when a project is too low-bandwidth, or too small, to justify an external observability platform.
Christopher shares his recent experiences with Memfault which leads to a discussion of chunks, flash memory buffers and MDS. The Memfault Diagnostic Service (MDS) is a standardized way for BLE devices to send the chunk payloads to a gateway device (mobile phone) which can then forward the data to the Memfault cloud.
If you want a deep dive into the reasoning around starting Memfault, Tyler was on Embedded.fm episodes 390: Irresponsible At the Time and 395: I Can No Longer Play Ping Pong.
Reaching back into the archives, Elecia, Tyler, and Phillip Johnston were on the Memfault Coredump Sessions podcast, a special crosspost with Embedded.fm, episode 451: From Concept to Launch
You can also find technical deep dives on Memfault’s Interrupt blog.
"What we do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make." – Dr. Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey.