wk87 is a dangerous topic for me, i've been through a lot. I apologise for what I am about to inflict on this network over the coming week.

Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 1, "T".

T was an embedded C developer who talked openly about how he's been writing code since he was 14, knew all the C system libraries and functions like the back of his hand. For the most part, he did ... but not how to actually use them, as (based on his shocking ... well everything) he was inflicted by some sort of brain disorder not yet fully understood by medical science. Some highlights:

- Myself and the CTO spent 4 days teaching him what a circle buffer was and how to build one.
- His final circle buffer implementation had about 3 times as much code as he actually needed.
- When the code was running too slowly on the device, we didn't try find any performance improvements, or debug anything to see if there was anything taking too long. No not with T, T immediately blamed TCP for being inefficient.
- After he left we found a file called "TCP-Light" in his projects folder.
- He accused the CTO of having "violent tendencies" because he was playing with a marker tossing it up in the air and catching it.
- He once managed to leave his bank statements, jumper and TROUSERS in the bathroom and didn't realise until a building wide email went out.
- He once .... no hang on, seriously his fucking trousers, how?
- He accused us all of being fascists because we gave out to him for not driving with his glasses, despite the fact his license says he needs to (blind as a bat).

... why were his trousers off in the first place? and how do you forget ... or miss the pile of clothes and letters in a small bathroom.

Moving on, eventually he was fired, but the most depressing thing of all about T, is that he might not even be top of my list.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

At a friend's party, I met one of the guys I've known from High school, and talk about what we've become:

Him: ...so yeah, now I study CS, I code some C, I dislike Java, blablablablabla I'm coding some OS and embedded software, blablablabla, and you, what do you code in?

Me: Oh, I learned everything I know by myself, still learning, and I'm mostly doing some PHP and Javascript. Doing websites and apps is cool.

Him: but those aren't programming languages? I mean, you can't manage memory, and blablablabla-

Me: Ó_Õ * Quickly dashed my ass off to talk with some ladies and boozed myself to forget what I just heard *

Recruiter logic

"We see you have JS experience, how about a job as a Senior C Embedded systems engineer, we can only pay 30$ an hour "

That's another semester completed!

Recruiter: hi, I have an iOS Developer role. Would you be interested?

Me: sure, send me on the spec.

Recruiter: ok great so for this Full stack app developer role we are looking for someone with:

- 5+ years embedded C/C++ experience
- 5+ years of working with Windows and Linux
- Native Android development
- As well as Native iOS experience

Interested?

Me: ......... ok buddy, you and me are going to have a little chat about what “iOS Developer” means

So I got a call from a recruiter this morning, about a job for a C++ developer what experience developing for embedded systems.

He sent my resume off to the company and they actually want an in person interview the same day.

I'm going to this interview in 2 hours, I'm really nervous, I haven't had an interview in years...

Wish me luck!

Been reviewing ALOT of client code and supplier’s lately. I just want to sit in the corner and cry.

Somewhere along the line the education system has failed a generation of software engineers.

I am an embedded c programmer, so I’m pretty low level but I have worked up and down and across the abstractions in the industry. The high level guys I think don’t make these same mistakes due to the stuff they learn in CS courses regarding OOD.. in reference how to properly architect software in a modular way.

I think it may be that too often the embedded software is written by EEs and not CEs, and due to their curriculum they lack good software architecture design.

Too often I will see huge functions with large blocks of copy pasted code with only difference being a variable name. All stuff that can be turned into tables and iterated thru so the function can be less than 20 lines long in the end which is like a 200% improvement when the function started out as 2000 lines because they decided to hard code everything and not let the code and processor do what it’s good at.

Arguments of performance are moot at this point, I’m well aware of constraints and this is not one of them that is affected.

The problem I have is the trying to take their code in and understand what’s its trying todo, and todo that you must scan up and down HUGE sections of the code, even 10k+ of line in one file because their design was not to even use multiple files!

Does their code function yes .. does it work? Yes.. the problem is readability, maintainability. Completely non existent.

I see it soo often I almost begin to second guess my self and think .. am I the crazy one here? No. And it’s not their fault, it’s the education system. They weren’t taught it so they think this is just what programmers do.. hugely mundane copy paste of words and change a little things here and there and done. NO actual software engineers architecture systems and write code in a way so they do it in the most laziest, way possible. Not how these folks do it.. it’s like all they know are if statements and switch statements and everything else is unneeded.. fuck structures and shit just hard code it all... explicitly write everything let’s not be smart about anything.

I know I’ve said it before but with covid and winning so much more buisness did to competition going under I never got around to doing my YouTube channel and web series of how I believe software should be taught across the board.. it’s more than just syntax it’s a way of thinking.. a specific way of architecting any software embedded or high level.

Anyway rant off had to get that off my chest, literally want to sit in the corner and cry this weekend at the horrible code I’m reviewing and it just constantly keeps happening. Over and over and over. The more people I bring on or acquire projects it’s like fuck me wtf is this shit!!! Take some pride in the code you write!

Hackathon: being a C and embedded dev and everybody like: let's do webz! Or appz!

I’m on the bus going to my first day at a new internship as a embedded C developer. Feeling very excited abou it .

Soooo I think I have finally come to the point that I may have to create a YouTube channel, to teach software engineering from the ground up... and teach it the way the universities and everyone else should be teaching it, so that they have a solid foundation.... throwing hello world, and loops and variables at folks out of the box without any of the environment context or low level embedded register, even logic gate understanding

That lack of understanding is why, soooo many college students and younger folks, are actually pretty shitty engineers. Everything is high level languages and theoretical concepts to them. Nothing practical, that’s why there’s sooo many python and java developers that can’t for the life of them understand memory management, low level hardware interfacing etc, because the colleges don’t teach it the way it use to be taught.

I seriously fear 30 years from now or sooner when there are few embedded engineers only left till retirement, as without those folks the whole pyramid of electronics falls to pieces.

Java, C#, python, all that shit don’t run on the bare metal... there’s this magical layer of C, and assembler that does all the work just so folks can abstract their thoughts.

Either 1 of two situations will happen.. price of electronics will rise because the embedded guys are few and far between therefore salaries skyrocket... OR everything starts running shit like java on the metal, where there are a over abundance of developers, their salaries will be low because there are soo many but the processing power, space, and energy needed to run java natively causes electronics cost to increase

but regardless 30 years from now if those script kiddies are building everything I fear it cuz there’s gonna be memory leaks, and overflow issues everywhere.. shit be blowing up more than 4th of July.. lol

Soooo in effort to prevent that and keep the embedded engineers up, or atleast properly educate the script kiddies, I’m gonna make that YouTube channel.. 1 maybe 2 videos a week, 1-2 hours sessions each.. starting at the fucken ground and building up.

To my fellow 🐍 charmers:
You should see in C to understand C, else you'll never see what's in C. It's a big sea, you better start C. 😍

Well, sh*t.

There is special hell for people using GOTO in C and even more special hell for people using it in *this* context.

I enjoy being an embedded software engineer that is allowed to use C for most projects and doesn't have to program JavaScript or PHP nor has to use dozens of foreign libraries.

!Rant

Designer decide to have a meeting with stakeholders about UX/UI workflow for control panel of our new embedded system (no framework, no library, gui is bit per bit rendered on frame buffer).
A week later, still nothing on my table, not a mail, not a call. Meanwhile I wrote a framework, the control system, renderer, and messaging queues between tasks.
Wrote some widgets, a layout system and a view swtching mechanism, and a separate stack control to use a "back" button.

Now I am stuck for I do not know what should happen when clicking on various (non obvious) items on the touchscreen.
Fine, I'll ask the designer.

"Oh, I will write the workflow next week" (ETA time, 2 weeks. Seriously? You take a week to draw on Adobe Illustrator 20 screenshot with text and I have another week to write it from scratch in C?)
Ok, while you write it, just tell me what should happen when I click an active item.
"Well, we didn't talk about that. We just decided the colour of the icons on the screen..."
For fuck sake...

! exactly dev

I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.

As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.

To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(

As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.

Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.

Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.

Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.

So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).

Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.

Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.

I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.

I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.

Been really busy with things haven’t got around to posting a book in like a week or so..

But I’ll post one today..

This book...

This book, available for free online or you can buy it, written in 1994. But so under appreciated by people for some reason most people never have seen it or know about it. But this is the ONLY book I know of that actually covers this topic.. the only book in existence that specifically goes thru how OOP can be done with C.

NOW hold up before you say just use C++ stop and think for a second.. bear with me.

First off this book is purely for informational purposes and educational use to deepen your understanding of what OOP is actually doing behind the scenes in languages like C++ where keywords exist for these things and you just blindly use them without thinking about under the hood.

This book contains a lot of code and builds you up a complexly library from scratch to make OOP in C... now I don’t take this book literally and this but I have implemented some concepts from this book in projects in the past, and it helps a lot.

Also in my honest opinion If you finish this book, you will be a better C programmer AND c++ programmer, C programming because it teaches you a lot about complex things that you never thought about doing with the language. It proves you can do polymorphism can do inheritance and encapsulation. And it’s not really bloated either.

This books is an awesome book, if you don’t understand C pointers you definitely will after this book.. if you don’t understand OOP in C++ what’s really going on.. you will after this book. After all C++ began as just a preprocessor of C.

Great book for writing reusable, extendable large scale embedded c systems.

Anyway.. rare book of which should not be rare considering it’s free.

Do some cool shit that I’ve always wanted to do.

- learn more about machine learning and computer vision
- learn C / C++ / rust
- learn embedded systems / programming
- learn more EE centered stuff

Next month I'm starting my master studies in embedded systems. Currently I have not any knowledge in this topic (made my bachelor in an other part of IT). Any tips or tricks?
Currently I'm starting learning C++ 😅

While coding in C, I once forgot to add a semicolon at the end of a while loop polling a register value.
The logic required me to make it zero as soon as it read non-zero and continue the rest of the process. Hence the 'while' that missed the semicolon ended up being a single instruction assignment to the same volatile register that I kept polling. This caused synchronisation issue with the FPGA, and my code got stuck in an uncertain infinite loop.
Took me 2 days and a silly, yet valid question from my teammate to figure out the cause of this stupid bug.

I'm convinced this is going to be wildly unpopular, but hey...

Please stop writing stuff in C! Aside from a few niche areas (performance-critical, embedded, legacy etc. workloads) there's really no reason to other than some fumbled reason about "having full control over the hardware" and "not trusting these modern frameworks." I get it, it's what we all grew up with being the de-facto standard, but times have moved on, and the number of massive memory leaks & security holes that keep coming to light in *popular*, well-tested software is a great reason why you shouldn't think you're smart enough to avoid all those issues by taking full control yourself.

Especially, if like most C developers I've come across, you also shun things like unit tests as "something the QA department should worry about" 😬

From 1978 comes the original, go to C programming language book. About 200 pages, packed full of the details of the C language. It’s a book that sits on your desk. No matter how many times I’ve read this book I always find something new in it.

Great book written.

Only recently purchased the physical books edition 1 and 2.. in the past I only ever read it on pdf or someone else’s hardcopy.

Being a embedded engineer, shame on me for not having this book at a desk ornament sooner lol.

Got an assignment in school to make an easy project in c for embedded real time processors with a free complexity level (it was really early in the course and many had never been programming before).

Since I've been working a few years in development I decided to create an own transmitter and receiver for an own protocol between processors (we had just spent a week to understand how to use existing protocols, but I made my own).

The protocol used only 1 line to communicate with half-duplex and we're self adjusting the syncing frequency during the transmission. I managed to transmit data up to 1 kbps after tweaking it a bit (the only holdback was the processors clock frequency).

Then I got the feedback from our teacher, which basically said:
"Your protocol looks like any other protocol out there. Have you considered using an UART?"

Like yeah, I see the car you built there looks like any other car out there, have you considered using a Volvo instead?

Angular is still a pile of steaming donkey shit in 2023 and whoever thinks the opposite is either a damn js hipster (you know, those types that put js in everything they do and that run like a fly on a lot of turds form one js framework to the next saying "hey you tried this cool framework, this will solve everything" everytime), or you don't understand anything about software developement.

I am a 14 year developer so don't even try to tell me you don't understand this so you complain.
I build every fucking thing imaginable. from firmware interfaces for high level languaces from C++, to RFID low level reading code, to full blown business level web apps (yes, unluckily even with js, and yes, even with Angular up to Angular15, Vue, React etc etc), barcode scanning and windows ce embedded systems, every flavour of sql and documental db, vectorial db code, tech assistance and help desk on every OS, every kind of .NET/C# flavour (Xamarin, CE, WPF, Net framework, net core, .NET 5-8 etc etc) and many more

Everytime, since I've put my hands on angularJs, up from angular 2, angular 8, and now angular 15 (the only 3 version I've touched) I'm always baffled on how bad and stupid that dumpster fire shit excuse of a framework is.

They added observables everywhere to look cool and it's not necessary.
They care about making it look "hey we use observables, we are coo, up to date and reactive!!11!!1!" and they can't even fix their shit with the change detection mechanism, a notorious shitty patchwork of bugs since earlier angular version.

They literally built a whole ecosystem of shitty hacks around it to make it work and it's 100x times complex than anything else comparable around. except maybe for vanilla js (fucking js).

I don't event want todig in in the shit pool that is their whole ecosystem of tooling (webpack, npm, ng-something, angular.json, package.json), they are just too ridiculous to even be mentioned.

Countless time I dwelled the humongous mazes of those unstable, unrealiable shitty files/tools that give more troubles than those that solve.

I am here again, building the nth business critical web portal in angular 16 (latest sack of purtrid shit they put out) and like Pink Floyd says "What we found, same old fears".
Nothing changed, it's the same unintelligible product of the mind of a total dumbass.

Fuck off js, I will not find peace until Brendan Eich dies of some agonizing illness or by my hands

I don't write many rants but this, I've been keeping it inside my chest for too long.

I fucking hate js and I want to open the head of js creator like the doom marine on berserk

This Book....

Before doing any systems programming you should definitely read this book... most people think they know what they are doing but in fact they are completely clueless and the worst part is you don’t realize how clueless you are... you don’t know what you don’t know nor do you know how much you really don’t know.. a most people are part of this group, including myself lol.

Computers are much more than a bunch of CPUs, buses and peripherals. (Embedded folks realize this). But this goes beyond embedded this is a systems book, on architecture of computers in general.

Learning only java and the java/C# python and the others SDK/Api and spending your life with horse blinders for what’s going on below only sets you up for failure in the future, and when you that point it’s gonna be a shocker. Could be tomorrow could be 20 years from now, but most people with those horseblinders get to that point and have that “experience” no avoiding the inevitable lol.

I really enjoyed this book in their quantitative approach to teaching the subject. Especially understanding parallelism and multi core systems.

I felt like being the cause for “that dreaded legacy code“ and wrote 250 lines of C preprocessor macros for generating bitfields in a large header file automatically, with the goal of simplifying and clarifying register access for all peripherals in the end. Then, I found out that SDCC's optimisation for bitfields is absolutely awful (if existent at all), and I don't really want to use these abstractions if they have a performance impact.

Did I deserve that?

Many people here rant about the dependency hell (rightly so). I'm doing systems programming for quite some time now and it changed my view on what I consider a dependency.
When you build an application you usually have a system you target and some libraries you use that you consider dependencies.
So the system is basically also a dependency (which is abstracted away in the best case by a framework).
What many people forget are standard libraries and runtimes. Things like strlen, memcpy and so on are not available on many smaller systems but you can provide implementations of them easily. Things like malloc are much harder to provide. On some system there is no heap where you could dynamically allocate from so you have to add some static memory to your application and mimic malloc allocating chunks from this static memory. Sometimes you have a heap but you need to acquire the rights to use it first. malloc doesn't provide an interface for this. It just takes it. So you have to acquire the rights and bring them magically to malloc without the actual application code noticing. So even using only the C standard library or the POSIX API can be a hard to satisfy dependency on some systems. Things like the C++ standard library or the Go runtime are often completely unavailable or only rudimentary.
For those of you aiming to write highly portable embedded applications please keep in mind:
- anything except the bare language features is a dependency
- require small and highly abstracted interfaces, e.g. instead of malloc require a pointer and a size to be given to you application instead of your application taking it
- document your ABI well because that's what many people are porting against (and it makes it easier to interface with other languages)

Ye, so after studying for an eternity and doing some odd jobs here and there, all I can show for are following traits:

* Super knowledgeable in arm/Intel assembly language
* C-Veteran with knowledge of some sick and nasty C-hacks/tricks which would even sour the mood of your grandma
* Acquired disdain of any and all scripting languages (how dare you write something in one line for which I need a whole library for!)
* All-in-all low-level programmer type of guy (gimme those juicy registers to write into!)

After completing the mandatory part of my computer science studies, all I did was immerse myself into low-level stuff. Even started to hold lectures and all.

Now I'm at the cusp of being let free into the open market.
The thing is: I'm pretty sure that no company is really interested in my knowledge, as no one really writes assembly anymore.

Sure, embedded programming is still a thing, but even that is becoming increasingly more abstract, with God knows how many layers of software between the hardware and the dev, just to hide all the scary bits underneath.

So, are there people in here who're actually exposed to assembly or any hands-on hardware-programming?
Like, on a "which bit in which register/addr do I need to set" - kind of way.

And if so, what would you say someone like me should lookout for in a company to match my interest to theirs?
Or is it just a pipe dream, so I'd need to brace myself to a mundane software engineer career where I have to process a ticket at a time?

(Just to give a reference: even the most hardware-inclined companies I found "near" me are developing UIs with HTML5 to be used in some such environment ....)

Seriously what's wrong with the market right now, this is basically what some job ads said. They were even from the same company

Frontend job ad: are you a rainbow rockstar developer who just loves to code OwO(unpaid overtime) [buzzwords...]

Embedded systems job ad:
Serious job description
Required experience in c/c++
Other non bs stuff

Who need arrays anyway...

Just read a job posting for a junior .Net software dev. 2 years experience in C#, Visual Studio, .Net. Usual suspects right, though two years experience for a junior seems off. But they also want embedded systems experience. wat?

!rant

I love the first weeks after a job change. It's just like falling in love, everything seems to be perfect until you take off the pink glasses.

Have to wait until I'm assigned a burning project to have a full picture.

Actually I am in a burning project. Deadline in 2 weeks. Doing Bugfixes which do not require in-depth project knowledge, and... It's fine. All a matter of perspective. I also think that project based work suits me more than usual 15y old legacy enterprise shit. And I'm able to switch. From embedded C++ over hardware dev to fullstack .NET (I consider myself as a full-fullstack dev, able to do everything from hardware to frontend).

Topics such as IOT, medical, device engineering, machine learning. Wow.

It's my first company having >50 employees and multiple offices in multiple countries. I used to jump every 2 years from one shitty garage company to another.

Wish me good luck ✌️

Just had an argument with someone who thinks (micro)python is the way to go for embedded projects. Cause a lot of engineers are terrible at using C/C++. And their argumets for optimisation and granular controll over what the processor does is not necessary.
Its utterly wrong to push technologies into areas for which they werent originally designed for. We've seen it alot with websites lately and I dont like that embedded is heading the same way!

Any embedded systems software engineers out there with practical experience in writing/designing safety critical applications? (think DO-178B/C) I've got a few years embedded experience under my belt between internships, my projects, and now my relatively new job at a major aviation company, but I feel like I'm behind on this topic of safety and code that can't fail. It's simply not taught and I really want to learn more. Partially it is out of personal pride because I want to make a great product, but more importantly, what I work on is protecting a human life. I really really really want to feel confident in what I build. Is there anyone out there who's got some years under their belt that can point me to some good references? Or maybe some helpful tips? Much appreciated. If it helps, all my work is in C.

New programmer who just pick up Python be like , C is shot , is bad , python better blablabla....

Why anyone hate C so much? I personally use C for Embedded Programming, for hardware or is better compare to using python for my case.

I love python , but I love C more. Because without C the rest don't exist. Right?

So stop hating on C. Because you might use it someday.

So, I'm still not certain if it's actually a bug or merely my lack of experience, but I've been working on a 2D platformer game (using only C++ and SDL2) for roughly 2 years now (on and off; sometimes off for months) and I'm extremely embarrassed about this, but for the life of me, I cannot seem to get the player character's movement and collision physics working properly. It's driving me absolutely insane.

I've read articles and tutorials, referenced books, and posted about it in game development communities (e.g., gamedev.com, Discord servers, etc.), but even though the fundamental structure and explanations made sense, getting the code to work has been unsuccessful, albeit not completely so, but if I get one thing working, another thing breaks. It feels like I'm trying to repair a vase that fell off of a skyscraper and turned to dust on the street below.

I've always been a very tech savvy person with a fiery passion for programming, electronics and game/software/embedded/web development, but to be honest, having such a difficult time with things like this that — in theory, at least — seem like trivial bumps in the road have made me feel like I'm never going to be successful in this field. But regardless of the depressing thoughts of worthlessness, my passion doesn't let me stop trying. Who knows, maybe it'll have to remain just a hobby. 😕

I am about to try TDD for embedded C. Does anyone around here tried that? What are your experiences with it? Thanks!

What the hell did I miss?

I've been seeing lots of dev communities joking/not joking about replacing C++.

Did we somehow replace all C code in literally every embedded product overnight?

Project Manager: "C++ has become much better for embedded now so we're gonna use it in the new project."

Me: "I didn't C that coming."

I know it's silly but I'm proud of it 🤓

Fuck windows!

Now that I have your attention. My problem is with "IAR embedded workbench", not so much with windows but I'll get to that.
I've used that IDE for a few years.. 2 years ago. Since then I apparently forgot how to even create a project from scratch with adding all the necessary libraries and all that.

My initial deal with a client was to give them a solution using whatever tools I deem necessary. As I recently moved to linux and IAR is not available for that os.. and I also enjoyed working with CLion and PyCharm which Are available I decide to use CLion to write my C project.
A problem was that to compile code for microcontrollers I need tools unsupported by CLion.. oh well. I can do all the compilation and uploading of the code through terminal .. so I make a bash script that does it all. Super convenient. Development is going well and all.. until they ask me for the project.

I sent them the project so that they can see my progress. They can't do shit with what I gave them because they don't even have make on their machines let alone the compiler. All they have is IAR. But the guy that wants to see the code is not really a programmer.. he is a hardware specialist so I can't expect him to do anything more than use what he knows. He doesn't need or want to learn more right now.

So I go to windows and start porting my code to an IAR project and 2 days later I am still stuck with it. FUCK. Not only was the installation process horrible but the tools I wanted to install additionally did not work as promised either.

I know it took me about 2 days to setup all I needed on linux but I was enjoying it every step of the way. While this garbage is frustrating me so much. The fact that I used to do it before adds to the pain.

I am this close to telling them to just look at my code in notepad and I can setup a vm for them in which they can compile it if they really really need to.

If they just told me from the very start that they want me to work with IAR that would have been fine. I would have never seen the easier way and would have gladly figure it out then. Not now.

C++99, C++03, C++11 and C++14

I love when your design finally ends up working, looks good and it's running as fast as Usain Bolt, but why the hell does OOP has to be so ugly and clunky in C++? Constructors and copy constructors designs are barf inducing. Yes I am trying to make it as readable and neat as possible but it still looks like shit overall. And related compiler errors are almost always retarded or unhelpful even though I'm used to it now.

I know you will tell me "why are you using those old ass versions?". Well unfortunately in embedded you are stuck with old crap until some envoy of the gods finally up the standards... or if I do it myself for a specific platform.

I just had to quit a part time programming job because I couldn't do it. I'm not really sure how I feel, there were alot of factors.

I took an internship about a year back to do some embedded C. I kicked ass and developed a system that really solved alot of problems for the company and so people started giving me "the hard back shelf problems". Like those problems that are really valuable if someone can get it working but not so important that it blocks anything day to day. Totally fair work for an intern, that is both complex and interesting.

When school started I took a part time remote role working on one of these problems. Fast forward to now (few months of remote work at school); i can't handle the stress. If I devote more time to work I fail a test. If I ace a test my work duties go neglected. On top of that my boss misses scheduled calls with me left and right, I even reminded him everyday 3 days before hand once!!!

Naturally I started feeling like I should quit. I was no longer interested in the work from a pure academic view, and emotionally hated doing it. However, since I was a good performer this place offered to interview my little brother!! Fuck, so do I choose my happiness or my brothers. It feels evil to choose myself over my brother. My brother, he's just a freshman so I know his odds are very low of getting an internship this year are low. And the place I worked at had some weight in the name so I could seriously jump start my little bros career. I do know however that if I don't quit that I will fail school, and do it while being miserable.

And so I quite my first remote job, from my first internship. I feel happy about, but also like I let someone down (them?, Me?, BROTHER?).

Any embedded C programers out there
Rant:I really strugling for work

I've been noticing that without any specialization development can become repetitive, as in, a bunch of fancy ways of doing the same CURD operations.

Something that just calls me is low level development, wether it is embedded development (microcontrollers and such) or Linux Kernel and device drivers. I've been polishing my C skills for a while now and started to look into kernel development and uff, is it overwhelming!

I just wanted to see if some of you guys are or had experience in system development and how you got there. Thx!

FML having to take on and support a python test framework that looks like it was written by a junior C embedded dev without a mentor.

- Imports everywhere in the code
- No abstraction or OOP
- sys.path.append fest (broken imports of course)
- Global variables fest
- No docstrings
- No readme
- Somehow mixed with a jUnit test framework as well
- Uses Windows environment variables profusely
- Pycharm has a stroke when I open files from this project

Does anyone here have any good resources for introduction to embedded, low level development, or anything on advanced C concepts? I've been having trouble trying to step into more complicated topics like bit manipulation and stuff I can do with memory management. Also any advice is also appreciated.

Anyone here worked a whole lot with low level programming?

I have always worked with high level languages like Python and C++, but I’ve also had an interest in working with embedded systems, real close to the metal.

Any directions on where I should go to start learning low level programming? Sites, languages, etc?

Appreciated devRant fam!😊

Hello ratnters,
I'm new around here and I'm part of the niche of embedded software developer.
Is there any fellow MCU programmer around here?

Have a great night everyone!

Definitely landing the first real gig.

I've been writing software since I was 12 (full disclosure: early code consisted of C=64 BASIC). I learned C in high school. Contributed to a MUD in my 20's. But I never got a CS degree and didn't really understand how hiring works, so I limped along doing technical support for years. Years turned into decades.

About 2 years ago, I became an embedded support person inside a development team. I got to show off my skills, and the year effectively became a live interview. Last October I finally got the title.

On the positive side, by taking the long way around I missed out on some of the insanity of the software world in the 90s/00s.

I'm thinking of designing a programming language.

I want it to have easy to read syntax like python. Inheritance and interfaces like java. More advanced concepts like pointers and memory management like c++.

I was originally going to write my own compiler but I figured it's not worth reinventing the wheel. So the current plan is to basically just create a parser that turns a source file into c++ code and then that is compiled with g++. The only problem I can think of with that is catching runtime errors.

How does this language sound?

My purpose is to have a language that is as easy to read as python but with the speed of a compiled program and the ability to use it for embedded projects. I feel like reading larger C++ projects can be quite time consuming. So I figure the trade off of taking a little longer to write the code to make it more obvious what is going on is better than having a lot of syntax that can be tough to walk though the logic of (I find this often with c and c++, not like I don't figure it out but It definitely takes longer than it does to read and understand python)

Not much tops the orgasm from powering thru 500+ lines of code in the zone... in vim...no debugger.. and without compiling just visually seeing in your mind the assembly be generated... and code being stepped thru.. and then compile and test and everything works as expected.. not sure anything tops that feeling ... definitely have to be in the zone.. one distraction and boom gotta compile to make sure nothing broke

I am overwhelmed in my mind right now and I kinda just need it out.

I'm incredibly divided. There's so much I want to do which is fine I can balance some of it kinda well but when it comes to the programming aspects of what I want to do is where my head gets tugged in multiple directions.

Parts of me really want to continue to dive into C# and learn it a lot more than I currently do so I can continue to write the tools I use for problems I come across.

And the other part of me just wants to go do lower level development with C because that's where most of my goals are being mostly embedded and OS development.

But so many people I know that are incredibly smart devs use C# and I see why it's an incredible language and I'm glad it's one of the languages I know but I feel like there's so much to learn about it and I there's so much shit I see that I'm just like I don't know when I would want to use this, or I can see X feature being very useful but I don't know where I'd use it in my projects. Hell even C#s version of structs I know are very useful but I'm not able to make good use of them

I'm just in that headspace where I'm not learning enough and I feel dumb when I look at someone else's project because there's a lot more complexity In their project that none of my projects have ever had and so many people make use of language features I've never used or thought about using (generics being a good example) and I'm constantly asking questions which I know is okay but too much is happening in life lately and it's just making it harder to handle.

Thanks to anyone that got through it hopefully I'm not alone in these feelings

I've just started freelancing on PeoplePerHour. I'm in talks to secure a job migrating a C# webapp to a desktop scenario using HTML5 embedded within WPF, but I've never done this as a solo project before. What sort of price is sensible to charge for this? I'm working in GBP

After debugging my embedded code for five hours my teammate just sent me a message "I just commited the latest PCB". Well thanks, after looking at the new layout I got the initial code working by just changing one variable!

I haven't chimed in on this spaces vs tabs war at all on this platform, mostly because I personally don't care and adapt to my work's/project's conventions, but I just have to put this out there now.

I am honestly so confused about the entire thing since seeing a lot of recent rants on the topic. I was originally conditioned to believe that the majority of devs in the world were FOR spaces over tabs. Thus, whenever I start a project, I default to spaces.

Contrary to that, it seems most devs here (or at least those who enjoy instigating some banter) actually prefer tabs. Now, I recently binged Silicon Valley and can't help but wonder if people around here are simply jumping on that band wagon for the sake of the joke.

Side note: I also thought Vim was more widely used over Emacs but Richard Hendricks asserts otherwise there too.

I know the main arguments for both sides - spaces yield code that looks the same in all editors while tabs produce smaller code. Anybody who argues that spaces are less efficient because you need to physically press the space bar 2/4/8/etc times is just retarded. If soft tabs weren't a thing, I don't think anybody would be on the side of spaces and for that reason I believe that episode in Silicon Valley was just trying to be overdramatized and push peoples' buttons.

All of that being said, I wonder if it's just a generational/field of development thing. Would it be wrong to propose that more older devs in the field of embedded and OS development (using C and the like) are in the spaces party while younger devs perhaps more into application and web dev (Javascript, C#, and shit) are all about tabs? I'm actually fresh out of university, but like I said my preference is spaces, though I don't really care.

I'm actually interested to find out what kind of environments breed these opposing mindsets so what do you guys think?

A lecturer for an Embedded Systems module who gave out drivers for an LCD display with no documentation at all, and about 4 functions for writing to the display and 3 initialisation functions, spent ages trying to actually decide what each function did by which memory addresses it was changing and how (made even better by the fact a good bit of the functions were written in Assembly since it was Embedded C)🙃

Debugging is not about process, it's about end.

(I just finished two week long debugging session - approx 5 hours a day. It was nasty bug appearing only with optimalizations in embedded C, you can imagine joy when it came to life tonight. So now I am resting at pub with glass of cider knowing I am loosing needed sleep but I simply do not care right now. Sweet careless.)

Pardon the rant; some of it can probably attributed to me, but please indulge me of you could.

I'm tasked with creating a report that pulls data from some sql tables in c#and presents it using javascript. My manager was nice enough to lend me his old sql query, so I run with that using sql connections. Now I find out AFTER I get my sql query string working and retrieving data properly that my manager wanted it done using linq and entity framework, so now I have to start over, a process made only more "fun" by the confusing and unintuitive column names of our sql tables.

Moral of the story: don't take the easy way out.

After I spend some time fixing that up, I have to print out the data using javascript and html, which my manager was kind enough to lend me. Cue me shutting off my brain and thinking that I should have the program open and display this stuff itself. Let me tell you that converting a console application to a Windows form application is not a fun experience, especially when entity framework makes classes named "application" and "form" from your database tables. After finally getting the WebBrowser form to work, I'm hit with a javascript error from the library my manager referenced (he is a programmer himself). I tell him about the error and he just tells me to write the html code to a .html on disk like he did, but never explicitly said he did until just now.

Fixed moral of the story: don't take the easy way out, unless you should.

I should clarify I was given the whole raw sql query and html with some embedded javascript and a reference to chart.js.

I am the technical lead in a project which uses a C# based framework. It's a lot of drag and drop, and C# scripts can be embedded for fancy stuff.

Scripts in general are not hard to do, it's harder to understand the business rules rather than the code itself.

I got hired as a junior to build this project from scratch as an MVP, and we need another junior to add enhancements and minor changes required from our end users. Since management wants me to move on working on more mid-senior development stuff, I'm supposed to be only supervising the juniors work (in the hopes that one day they'll be able to work on their own).

We've had bad luck filling this position. Our last hire is a guy like 17 years older than me, supposedly with experience in said framework but OH DEAR GOD.

Fucktard can't understand requirements and corrections, isn't able to deliver a 20 line script without fucking up. I give him a list with 3 mistakes to fix and only fixes two, crap like that.

Now, hear me out, the mistakes are stuff like:

- Unused variables
- Confusing error messages
- Error messages written in spanglish (mix between Spanish and English, we're located in Latin America)
- Untested features, this is the worst of all.

You may say "but he's a junior", sure. But as I said, he supposedly has experience, more years in IT than me, and fine, you're allowed to fuck up a few times on your first tasks but not make the same mistakes over and over, specially since we've already sat down and addressed these issues in presence of the CTO.

Fuck this guy. I genuinely dislike him as a person also, he is from another latin country and we have some serious cultural differences. For instance, he insists on sucking your ass constantly, being overly well manered (we already saluted with the whole team at the daily stand up, stop saying hello, good day, regards in each of your fucking chat messages or task submissions), and other mannerisms that are hard to translate, but whatever, all of these attitudes are frowned upon here. They're not necessary, we just want to keep it simple, cordial and casual and see you deliver the crap that you're being paid for with a decent level of quality.

On Monday the CTO comes back from vacation, I'm looking forward to that meeting, gonna report his ass, there is evidence everywhere on our issue tracker.

Hey remote workers.

What would be your advice for someone with experience that's interested in exploring remote work.

I'd like to target this question to remote workers that live outside USA/EU/UK. Say South America, South Asia.

A little introduction.

I'm a full stack engineer, did one project in embedded systems with QT/C++/RPI can do backend in Python, Node, Java, C#. I have some experience with React Native (just 2 apps)

I currently I do full stack with Node, React, postgres and caching with couchdb.
I gather requirements, write the projects, proposals and then I do the implementation. (Really full stack, I kinda like it though, when I'm bored with code I pick up an issue and contact the client to socialize/get answers. I found out that nondevs like to feel they talk to a human not a robot)

I'm making about 600usd/month (dev in a poor country) working 30hrs /week. I'd like to ramp up my income, working remote part time to fill up about 50hr week.

What can I expect?
Where do I start?
Are there part time opportunities for working remote?
What kind of roles are in demand?

"Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. " - Richard C. Trench

Oh... I dont know what to pick...
So i will pick 3 projects from my 3 stages of my dev "carrier"

1.Right after i discovered programing and learned how ,if, while and similar structures worked. The launguage was object pascal with delphi 2007
That was a "safe" with a stupidly complicated lock (text inputs, sliders, ect) it opened a secret folder in the end.

2. It was a embedded code for a Atmega8 AVR, Atmel studio, pure C but without memory managment (i didnt even know that it even existed)
It was a Pip boy knockoff, 16x2 display and a small keyboard connected to the arduino like board that i made on a proto board.
It wasnt that much of a pipboy, it was more of a showoff of atmega8 internal systems, (ADC, timers, interrupts and such)

3.DataLab, after helping my friend with his master thesis, (we meet on discord long story, i was in high school) i decided that mathlab is shit and i created a visual scripting enviroment, launguage C# .net 4 (in the latest version)
I remade the whole program from scrach 1 time, significantly improving everything (code reuse, better algorithms, data processing, code redability and edge cases) I have learned good practises from everywhere. I learned how to use git.

DataLab project looks just like LabViev (i didnt notice that it even existed...), it is frozen now because of my mental status but im planning on using it on my CV when i will be looking for jobs on holidays. There are many things that i can improve in that program but ... first i have to fix myself.

2014
I did some cool projects with node JS.
We had this project where we had several embedded sensor box components communicating via a node js server backend with some fancy visualization.
And one of the guys was a total idiot. His part was to write some embedded code for a sensor box. He also wrote some data receiver in C# which was a totally over patterned mess and nothing worked.
For some unknown reason this guy made me his arch nemesis. He also never liked the team. While the rest of the team actually was super cool.
So in the final presentation out of a sudden in his part of the presentation (He had a Mac and had his slides done in some nasty whatever incompatible format) he pulled out some slides with code metrics. The best part was where he compared the embedded C code with my js code in terms of cyclomatic complexity. I will never forget this moment. Some nice bar chart.

Good I loved that guy for this moment.
And that made my year!

TLDR, need suggestions for a small team, ALM, or at least Requirements, Issue and test case tracking.

Okay my team needs some advice.

Soo the powers at be a year ago or so decided to move our requirement tracking process, test case and issue tracking from word, excel and Visio. To an ALM.. they choice Siemens Polarion for whatever reason assuming because of team center some divisions use it..

Ohhh and by the way we’ve been all engineering shit perfectly fine with the process we had with word, excel and Visio.. it wasn’t any extra work, because we needed to make those documents regardless, and it’s far easier to write the shit in the raw format than fuck around with the Mouse and all the config fields on some web app.

ANYWAY before anyone asks or suggests a process to match the tool, here’s some back ground info. We are a team of about 10-15. Split between mech, elec, and software with more on mech or elec side.
But regardless, for each project there is only 1 engineer of each concentration working on the project. So one mech, one elec and one software per project/product. Which doesn’t seem like a lot but it works out perfectly actually. (Although that might be a surprise for the most of you)..
ANYWAY... it’s kinda self managed, we have a manger that that directs the project and what features when, during development and pre release.

The issue is we hired a guy for requirements/ Polarion secretary (DevOps) claims to be the expert.. Polarion is taking too long too slow and too much config....

We want to switch, but don’t know what to. We don’t wanna create more work for us. We do peer reviews across the entire team. I think we are Sudo agile /scrum but not structured.

I like jira but it’s not great for true requirements... we get PDFs from oems and converting to word for any ALM sucks.. we use helix QAC for Misra compliance so part of me wants to use helix ALM... Polarion does not support us unless we pay thousands for “support package” I just don’t see the value added. Especially when our “DevOps” secretary is sub par.. plus I don’t believe in DevOps.. no value added for someone who can’t engineer only sudo direct. Hell we almost wanna use our interns for requirements tracking/ record keeping. We as the engineers know what todo and have been doing shit the old way for decades without issues...

Need suggestions for small team per project.. 1softwar 1elec 1mech... but large team over all across many projects.

Sorry for the long rant.. at the bar .. kinda drunk ranting tbh but do need opinions...

There’s somewhat of a magical moment when you teach the interns how to turn their huge switch statement into a function Pinter branch table....

Eliminating shotgun surgery as the project advances and new features are added to a module.

Colleges definitely don’t teach students certain things... and when I end up teaching them... the excitement and ideas they come up with are always great.. and they always end up with a stronger understanding of things.

(Embedded company .. all software here is C or C++) yes we use the optimizer.... sometimes you gotta do seemingly complex things to improve readability and maintainability.

Why those f***ers in Freescale was unable to keep architecture same across their product lines? Why has KL25Z completely different archtecture than KL28Z? Registers are renamed randomly, peripheries removed and added with different architecture... That naming is just happy coincidence not same line in their products...

This porting is gonna be fun.

FML.

Can I program any hardware (like toys) with a CH340?

So I was working on Nex Robotics's Firebird V,
Was doing some graph traversal thing...

And was breaking my head for 28hrs... I was passing the bot an structure of direction and no. Of times it had to take that direction...

something like for(int i=0; i<dir.times;i++)

And after 29 hrs I realized it also had negative values...

that effing abs() was missing 😫

Vent-rant. Fuck Wordpress and PHP and overly limiting css frameworks in their greasy unstable fucking assholes. I find embedded and / or game-dev C++ waaaaay more fun and pleasant, and logical than this fucking pile of cuntfuckery. I think I'm gonna switch my job, hopefully there's some C/C++ companies in my area.

Why the hell is there no embedded SQL database for golang?! Only Sqlite, and this is wrapped C.

This code knows exactly how hygiene works.

Footnote: this is from prod code.

Experimented with embedded Rust. Fuck that. C is a brilliant small language. Trustworthy. Rust is just C++ killer, it doesn’t belong in embedded domain. Bloated syntax, verbose error handling, crap quality crates with little to no documentation.

We have a C++ for embedded systems training at work this week.
References are a good thing but after looking for the reason why one object has no reference to the other for half of an hour just to realise that my member wasn't a reference so that i got an copy gave me the urge to use pointers instead. But unfortunately we'd to use a reference in this simple exercise which cost me a lot of time because that damn reference.

memcpy to fill a struct in an environment that should run on both big and little endian HW...
Yep that guy went on to project management. 😂

Any c++ embedded system programmers here.what kind of work do you do ,what are your daily tasks etc.and what boards do you use