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!!!

Just called Asus for a problem with my router, went to send them my systemlog.txt for analysis

"Oh we don't have an email you can send that to"

Me: "(me calling bullshit) let me talk to the tech team.."

*Get transferred*

"Hello this is the supervisor"

Me: "fml"

"Ya we don't have an email you can send that to, but we can use a different departments verification services to get a file from you, has to be a picture though"

Me: "What? I got a .txt file here, I just want to get it to you, does it really have to be a picture?"

"Has to be a picture or a PDF, we can't take txt files"

Me: "fkin.. srsly? Fine"

I can't believe Asus's system srsly. I think it's for virus protection, but viruses can be embedded in both picture formats and PDF, but not in txt. So wtf is going on lol

Frack he did it again.
In a meeting with the department mgr and going over a request feature *we already discussed ad nauseam* that wasn’t technically feasible (do-able, just not worth the effort)

DeptMgr: “I want to see the contents of web site A embedded in web site B”
Me: “I researched that and it’s not possible. I added links to the target APM dashboard instead.”
Dev: “Yes, it’s possible. Just use an IFrame.”
DeptMgr: “I thought so. Next sprint item …what’s wrong?…you look frustrated”
Me: “Um..no…well, I said it’s not possible. I tried it and it doesn’t work”
Dev: “It’s just an IFrame. They are made to display content from another site.”
Me: “Well, yes, from a standard HTML tag, but what you are seeing is rendered HTML from the content manager’s XML. It implemented its own IFrame under the hood. We already talked about it, remember?”
Dev: “Oh, that’s right.”
DeptMgr: “So it’s possible?”
Dev: “Yea, we’ll figure it out.”
Me: “No…wait…figure what out? It doesn’t work.”
Dev: “We can use a powershell script to extract the data from A and port it to B.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell, good…Next sprint item…”
Me: “Powershell what? We discussed not using powershell, remember?”
Dev: “It’s just a script. Not a big deal.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell sounds like a right solution. Can we move on? Next sprint item….are you OK? You look upset”
Me: “No, I don’t particularly care, we already discussed executing a powershell script that would have to cross two network DMZs. Bill from networking already raised his concern about opening another port and didn’t understand why we couldn’t click a link. Then Mike from infrastructure griped about another random powershell script running on his servers just for reporting. He too raised his concern about all this work to save one person one click. Am I the only one who remembers this meeting? I mean, I don’t care, I’ll do whatever you want, but we’ll have to open up the same conversations with Networking again.”
Dev: “That meeting was a long time ago, they might be OK with running powershell scripts”
Me: “A long time ago? It was only two weeks.”
Dev: “Oh yea. Anyway, lets update the board. You’ll implement the powershell script and I’ll …”
Me: “Whoa..no…I’m not implementing anything. We haven’t discussed what this mysterious powershell script is supposed to do and we have to get Mike and Bill involved. Their whole team is involved in the migration project right now, so we won’t see them come out into the daylight until next week.”
DevMgr: “What if you talk to Eric? He knows powershell. OK…next sprint item..”
Me: “Eric is the one who organized the meeting two weeks ago, remember? He didn’t want powershell scripts hitting his APM servers. Am I the only one who remembers any of this?”
Dev: “I’m pretty good with powershell, I’ll figure it out.”
DevMgr: “Good…now can we move on?”

GAAAHH! I WANT A FLAMETHROWER!!!

Ok…feel better, thanks DevRant.

Random tip:

A Decrementing loop that compares against a zero is faster (even though insignificant on current hardwares)
than an Incrementing loop that compares against a constant/variable.

For example:

for( i = num; i != 0; i -- )

is faster than

for( i = 0; i != num; i ++ )

The difference shows up significantly on resource constrained hardwares such as 8-bit microcontrollers.

More details in comment.

The programmer and the interns part 3.

Many of you asked me to keep posting about the interns that I'm responsible for.

I had the intention but never had the time or the energy. Since the interns only kept doing stupid, unthinkable things and just filtering out the good ones is a task of its own.

Time has passed, some interns left us by their choice, others were fired (for obvious reasons). Some stayed loyal and were given permanent positions. New ones joined. I no longer am directly responsible for their wellbeing, yet, somehow I am still their tech-lead and the developer of their tools.

Without further delay,

Case 0:
New guy get's into the internship, has his LinkedIn title set to ‘HTML Technician’.
Didn’t know about the existence of HTML5.
Been building static web pages in the early 2000s. The kind with embedded, inline CSS.
Claims that he is about to finish an engineering degree (sadly I believe him).
Fails the entry level Linux test. Complains about the similarity of the answer options.
Fails the basic web-standars test because "they change so fast, but the foundation is HTML and it's rock-solid!".
Get's caught taking home onions and milk from the kitchen.
Is spotted eating in a restaurant under our offices in his day off. Thrice. He lives a 30 minute drive away and comes here on a bicycle or by bus.
Apparently didn't know that the scrolling wheel on the mouse is clickable.
Said that his PC experience is mostly from his PlayStation (PC = PlayCtation apparently).
Get's fired, says that he'll go to the press. Never does.

Case 1:
Yet another new intern. He seems very eager to learn and work, capable, even charismatic. Has an impressive CV.
Does nothing.
Learns from the "case 0" guy and spends time with him until he is fired.
Comes to work at 8:00 AM and immediately goes to sleep on an office puff. In front of everyone.
Keeps dining alone, without a notice, at different times, for hours. Sometimes brings food into the office and loudly eats it there.
On his evening shifts keeps disappearing for long periods of time. Apparently drinking in the nearby bars and hitting on girls.
Keeps bragging about his success with getting their numbers and rants about those who reject him.
For over a year he fails his final training test and remains a trainee, without the ability to work on a real case.
Not fired yet.

Case 2:
Company retreat. Beautiful, exotic views, warm sun beams, all inclusive package for everyone on a huge half-island.
Simon (he's still with us, now as a true engineer!) brings his MacBook to the beach in order to work and impress all others.
Everybody get's drunk and start throwing huge inflatable balls at each other. One hits his laptop and it immediately is flattened.
Upset Simon is going in circles and ranting about the situation, looking for a solution.
Loses his phone on the beach.
Takes his broken laptop with him while searching for the phone.
Dips the laptop in the river while drunkenly ducking in order to pick a clam.

Case 3:
Still company retreat.
Drunk intern makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Huge verbal fight. The husband says that he files for a divorce. Intern get's fired.

Case 4:
Still company retreat.
Three interns each take an inflatable swimming mattress and drift with the current. Get found on the other side of the resort three hours later, with red skin and severely dehydrated.

Case 5:
Still company retreat.
The 'informally fired' intern gets drunk again, climbs through a window into a room and makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Again, gets caught when the husband returns to find a locked door but can see them though the window.

Case 6:
Still company retreat.
We all get ferociously drunk and wander off to the unknown in search of more booze.
Everybody does something stupid and somebody finds Simon's phone.
Simon is lost.
Frenzied horde of drunks is roaming the half-island in search of ethanol and the lost comrade.
Simon's phone get's permanently lost.
Five people step on sea urchins but find that out only hours later and then are unable to walk.
The mob, now including more drunk people who joined voluntarily, finds the sexually active intern making out with the enraged employee's wife yet again.
Surprisingly Simon is found sleeping in a room nearby.

At the beginning of an interview...

HR girl: You know, that position you applied is already taken but I found some similar in our company.
Me: Uhm, ok?
HRG: What about this one? It's some programming... *pointing at some IT position regarding db maintenance* Do you want to try that?
Me: Sure, why not.

I was applying to student position at embedded firmware development at the time. I did some school project with MySQL but it was few years back and I happily forgot most about it.
Anyway, story continues.

IT manager: Hi, I heard you want to join our lines.
Me: That is what I heard as well.
IT: Eh?
Me: I came for completely different position actually.
IT: Uhm, ok. We have standardised test, let's see what you can do.

It was some basic stuff for db guys but I was totally lost. I was done after 3 minutes returning nearly blank paper.
We shaked hands, both agreed this is not well fit for me and I went away.

After this botched attempt HR girl remembered that there is another team looking for embedded developer students. I was accepted.

Corporates are marvelous.

!rant
Worked all day and got my embedded systems project working the first time! Bluetooth as well! 😁

It's a Fitbit clone that keeps track of steps that I did from scratch and writing the companion app from scratch as well in flutter/dart. Ask any questions if you're curious!

This is why my embedded system keeps crashing

Yesterday I used a company service account to email over 1,000 internal employees (mostly application managers and the like) about an old OS version their servers are using which must be upgraded in a few months. It's an automated email that will repeat each month until the servers are upgraded.

That is not the part that might get me fired.

The part that might get me fired is an easter egg I left in the html content of the email itself.

In the embedded html of the message, I buried a comment block that contains a full-screen ascii-art drawing of a spooky tree and grim reaper standing beside a tombstone. The tombstone has the OS info and dates on it. Beneath the ascii-art is a bastardized quote in homage to Metallica's "For Whom The Bell Tolls", referring to the OS end-of-life.

The ascii-art is visible in both the html and the internal git repo that contains the email template.

This is a bit of a shoe-horn for this weekly group rant, as I doubt there is any chance I would really be fired over this, as I (sadly) expect that absolutely NO ONE who receives the messages will ever actually see the comments. But it's out there in the corporate network now... and will be sent over and over for the next few months...

There is a better chance someone may catch the easter egg in the git repo, but I kind-of doubt that, too - so I wanted to at least share with my devRant friends that it's out there, so at least someone else knows than just me. 😝

That's it. I fucking quit.

Over a month of unpaid work, developing your stupid course, only to get a high-quality outline rejected because "it's not what we wanted" again.

First outline, fuckers ask to do something with a Raspberry Pi and Yocto. Fine, but no Yocto as I don't know anything about it and the coworker doesn't even have a Raspberry Pi to flash the images on. Micromanagement guy (god I hate that word) agrees, fine no Yocto then. So no Yocto it is.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished. Review stage.. rejected. Needs moar Yocto.
Fine... I'll include Yocto. Coworker was put off the course, I'm exclusively on it now. Time to do it well and get my feet wet with Yocto.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished and looks pretty good. Review stage.. rejected. Needs less Raspberry Pi. Do it without the Raspberry Pi.

An embedded systems course whose core component is that fucking Raspberry Pi. Omit it they said. WHAT?!!
"Oh yeah but there's this other course that's selling like hot pockets, we can just redo that in videos. Make it more like that course."
You.. you can't be for real, can you? If students want to take that course... What makes you think that they wouldn't just pick.. *that damn course* then?

"But hey" micromanager said, "don't loose hope and confidence, I'm here🤪"
🤪. That describes your level of competence pretty well, you stinking piece of apeshit.
Go back to your micromanaging, at least you don't completely fucking suck at that.

2 times rejected because YOU fucking company's board can't describe your desires in a course properly. You know what, I think I'm starting to understand why web devs keep on complaining about indecisive clients now. Because you know company's board, you seem a lot like those clients from hell. Eat shit.

🖕

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 *

"Europe to make it illegal to change the OS on radio devices like smartphones, routers and embedded devices."

I don't know what to say anymore

My mother used to code a good 30 years ago (embedded development for plane engines), but nowadays always fear doing something wrong on her computer/smartphone.

It's a bit depressing to see how someone who used to be a developer is now so fearful of computers.

On the plus side, she is very respective of my time, and will wait 2/3 weeks for me to come home to fix a simple thing, and generally don't bother me with things she can do herself, once I explain to her how to do it.

Last time was cleaning laptop fans. Seeing how you need to disassemble half of it to clean that, I can understand anyone not wanting to do it.

This was my day at work today
-Be me at work
-Use git terminal on WORK PROVIDED MacBook
-Decide to clone into a repo into another repo as it was one project inside another project
-Makes changes to code
-Attempts to add .
- warning: adding embedded git repo ...
-Apparently needs submodules
-Shit doesn't get added
-During this get asked to create 2 new branches and modify some code
-Do that specifying files to add as add . breaks everything
-Has 3 branches now detached from master
-Super confused where anything is and what's going on
-Go back to branch for other repo to get added to
-Spends 30 minutes trying to understand submodules
-Gives up and deletes folder moving it elsewhere
-Commits begin failing everywhere. Super confused.
-Get everything figured out and commiting
-Goto merge all branches to master
-Merge conflict with .DS_Store
-FML

I think I'm done guys

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!

Hai devRant! Working on the privacy app and want opinions on the page for details on specific apps (as in, applications so web/app/mobile or even embedded?!).

Yeah I know that the aligning is deffo not perfect but hey, gotta start somewhere :). Detail: everything you see here (the content and actually also the icon path) is rendered from the database already.

Tips/opinions?

I receive those Nigerian prince scam emails all the time. I've always wanted to know more about them. So I sent them an embedded IP grabbing image link in my reply.

Turns out they really are from Nigeria. Just reported them to their ISP. Take that you pricks 😛 !!!

"So what do you study?"
"uhm.. Embedded Systems."
*confused look*
*sigh* "Programming"
"Oh, OK!"

Someday in an embedded course:

Lecturer: "You'll want the following drivers and SDK for this lecrure. With some tweaks it'll also work on Windows."

Guy with shiny Mac infront: "What about Mac?"

Lecturer: "WTF? You don't use Mac for embedded systems." o.O

Me: lol 😁

Imagine, you get employed to restart a software project. They tell you, but first we should get this old software running. It's 'almost finished'.
A WPF application running on a soc ... with a 10" touchscreen on win10, a embedded solution, to control a machine, which has been already sold to customers. You think, 'ok, WTF, why is this happening'?
You open the old software - it crashes immediately.
You open it again but now you are so clever to copy an xml file manually to the root folder and see all of it's beauty for the first time (after waiting for the freezed GUI to become responsive):
* a static logo of the company, taking about 1/5 of the screen horizontally
* circle buttons
* and a navigation interface made in the early 90's from a child
So you click a button and - it crashes.
You restart the software.
You type something like 'abc' in a 'numberfield' - it crashes.
OK ... now you start the application again and try to navigate to another view - and? of course it crashes again.
You are excited to finally open the source code of this masterpiece.

Thank you jesus, the 'dev' who did this, didn't forget to write every business logic in the code behind of the views.
He even managed to put 6 views into one and put all their logig in the code behind!
He doesn't know what binding is or a pattern like MVVM.
But hey, there is also no validation of anything, not even checks for null.
He was so clever to use the GUI as his place to save data and there is a lot of parsing going on here, every time a value changes.
A thread must be something he never heard about - so thats why the GUI always freezes.

You tell them: It would be faster to rewrite the whole thing, because you wouldn't call it even an alpha. Nobody listenes.
Time passes by, new features must be implemented in this abomination, you try to make the cripple walk and everyone keeps asking: 'When we can start the new software?' and the guy who wrote this piece of shit in the first place, tries to give you good advice in coding and is telling you again: 'It was almost finished.' *facepalm*
And you? You would like to do him and humanity a big favour by hiting him hard in the face and breaking his hands, so he can never lay a hand on any keyboard again, to produce something no one serious would ever call code.

Lost a bet and switched from Vim to VS Code for a day. Ten minutes into, I found myself editing gitignore in the embedded terminal. Something went wrong.

Client: "I cannot understand why the page loads so slowly"
Me: "Maybe it's because of the 68 YouTube videos you just embedded"

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!

Give me a 10 year old application with no comments, layers of spaghetti code, global variables, embedded SQL, and a text editor with no debugging; just don’t make me write Excel formulas.

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

Stupid boss story:

I got a job doing embedded media hardware stuff last year. From day one, it was pretty clear that management didn't like me (being called a faggot and a tranny tends to give one that impression) and had no fucking clue what they were doing (they are IT managers after all). I have a largely self taught infosec/hardware-design background and probably could have done all their jobs myself without even smoking more than usual, but I was the only one on staff who was never promoted despite easily working twice the hours. After bringing up the issue, my boss gave the position I wanted to an employee known for being an incompetent piece of shit, likely to spite me, and the same day sent an "automated" email saying that all staff in my section had been laid off due to restructuring, except that email didn't have a Bcc marking and was sent personally rather than using the corporate mass mailer. I'm back to doing the usual grey hat OSINT and people-finding, and it *just so happens* that a long time friend wants dirt on folks who it turns out are in regular contact with my old employers. Lucky me ;)

Didn't it take us years to stop writing javascript and html embedded? Is it just me or are we going back where we started? It's all a mix now!

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

LED! Please, embedded programmers: STOP blinking LEDs, if you don't require immediate attention!!

That phone that would blink through the night charging, I had to put a blanket on it D:<<

I *hate* how being a hacker nowadays gets you so much bad cred. I do things like exploits against embedded devices to be able to understand them and repair them, physical hacks to repair a broken device (like cutting a notch in something to make a replacement part fit), and things like that. Being a hacker does NOT mean I'm part of some government takeover bullsh*t set out to hack the pentagon or rig the election. It also does NOT include mindless banging on a keyboard. And no, I cannot hack someone's facebook for you, track someone's device, etc. Just..no.

When working in embedded, you basically write your program, compile it and flash it on some hardware.
Compiling and flashing usually require some black magic commands with lots of parameters so i set up two shortcuts in my terminal
yolo to compile
swag to flash

Understandably i keep it to myself

The guy where I can only shake my head when I see his code, and he is really proud of if implementations, while he

- doesn't care about warnings

- breaks builds and doesn't care

- doesn't care about code styles and indents in a very column based way

- adds tons of comments to his code, mostly hard to understand, and sometimes that much you can hardly find the code

- implements a tokenizer where you have to inherit from its interface (Why would I wanna implement whole functions for a tokenizer and not just use it in place where needed? How do I use two of those in one class?)

- implement a "generic" state machine base class with fixed lengths array of 3 events and 3 strings (Why would I need events and strings hardcoded in a "generic" state machine? Why a maximum of 3?)

- once delivered a software without the needed runtime components, so the whole system (embedded device) wasn't working properly and only by chance missed the point of disabling update mechanisms

- make your ears bleed about his big inventions whenever he sees you, no matter how often he already told you about that blazing new feature

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.

Been reading devRant for a while now and I have to say I'm sad about the way the future of the software engineering looks like. Everyone seems to have a lot of hatred towards certain techniques and/or platforms and sad to say, but you are missing a lot.

I have been in the biz for around 15 years and have worked on Win, Linux, Mac, Unix, Symbian, Embedded etc. using all sorts of tools and languages and I must say it has taught me a lot and given diversity on my career and I hope you could also open your mind and start educating yourselves. Theres a world behind your bubble!

Peace and love!

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. 😍

I seriously do not understand the rants against Windows.

I love Windows 10 (got as free upgrade from MS), and have no issues with MacOS or Linux OS. I use them as well but do all serious work on Windows.

All my life, I have worked on business / commercial side and picked up Web development in last couple of years. I started using computers on DOS in 1992, and shifted to Windows 3.0 in 1995. There was no Mac or MacOS back then.

For serious work, I purchased a old Dell Precision M4700 workstation grade laptop with quad-core i7, at throwaway price, got 32GB RAM, 2.4TB (1x2 TB + 400gb) of SSD on super sale online, and installed it myself. It easily supports dual 4k monitors.

Git-bash on windows allows all the necessary linux command line on windows. Though not tried, Windows 10 allows embedded Ubunutu with linux terminal. Web development tools like - VSCode, git, github / bitbucket clients, NVM/Node, React / Redux / Webpack / Gatsby / Jest, REST clients, GraphQL client and server, Graph Server, Chrome PWA / Chrome Dev Tools, http/Websocket/WebRTC interception, Google Firebase SDKs, AWS sdks, cloud utilities, CI/CD tools work flawlessly. Windows even has its own package manager for applications.

Is it just me or is everyone on here basically a web dev?

Where I work we develop drivers and command-line software for embedded systems. The contracts we have with our customers tend to be in the £100k-£500k range and are usually completed in 6 - 9 months; our team is made up of 20 developers. You would think that it would be worthwhile investing in the department. But no, instead we have to deal with >10 year old build servers on their last legs; limited numbers of development boards with wires soldered on so that we can keep up with new board revisions; no room for R&D into new products; and to top it all off, not one of the executives has a laptop on par with the placement students in the next department. It's like the company is trying to kill the department, we've seen our staffing dwindle with no new graduate (or higher) positions being made available in the last 3 years while we've lost at least 5 people to other places. I just don't get it!

[long]
When searching for internship via school I found this small startup with this cute project of building a teaching tool for programming. There were back then 2 programmers: the founder and the co-founder.

Then like 1 week before the internship started, the co-founder had a burnout and had to get off the project, while the company was so low on budget the founder, aka my new b0ss, had to work separate jobs to keep the company alive. (quite metal tbh)

It's funny because I'm a junior developer, 100%. I've been coding as a hobby for around 8 years now but I've never worked in a big company before. (No exception to this workplace either)

First project I get: rewrite the compiler. The Python compiler.
"But wait, why not just embed a real compiler from the first case?"
-nanananana it's never simple, as you probably know from your own projects.

The new compiler, as compared to existing embedded compiler solutions out there, needed these prime features:
- Walk through the code (debugger style), but programmatically.
- Show custom exceptions (ex: "A colon is needed at the end of an if-statement" instead of "Syntax error line 3")
- Have a "Did-you-mean this variable?" error for usage of unassigned variables.
- Be able to be embedded in Unity's WebGL build target

All for the use case of being a friendly compiler.
The last dash in the list is actually the biggest bottleneck which excluded all existing open-source projects (i could find). Compliant with WebAssembly I can't use threads among other things, IL2CPP has lots of restrictions, Unity has some as well...

Oh and it should of course be built using test-driven development.

"Good luck!" - said the founder, first day of work as she then traveled to USA for **3 weeks**, leaving me solo with the to-be-made codebase and humongous list of requirements.

---

I just finished the 6th week of internship, boss has been at "HQ" for 3 weeks now, and I just hit the biggest milestone yet for this project.

Yes I've been succeeding! This project has gone so well, and I'm surprising myself how much code I've been pumping out during these weeks.

I'm up now at almost 40'000 lines of source and 30'000 lines of code. ‼
( Biggest project I've ever worked on previously was at 8'000 lines of code )

The milestone (that I finished today) was for loops! As been trying to showcase in the GIF.

---

It's such a giant project and I can honestly say I've done some good work here. Self-five. Over-performing is a thing.

The things that makes me shiver though is that most that use this application will never know the intricates of it's insides, and the brain work put into it.

The project is probably over-engineered. A lot. Having a home-made compiler gives us a lot of flexibility for our product as we're trying to make more of a "pedagogic IDE". But no matter that I reinvented the wheel for the 105Gth time, it's still the most fun I've had with a project to date.

---

Also btw if anyone wants to see source code, please give me good reasons as I'm actively trying to convince my boss to make the compiler open-source.

Cheers!

1 friend who is currently studying in Canada.
I am not aware if he uses devrant or not.

Met him in a national robotic competition 3 years back.
Somehow, we exchanged numbers and nowadays we talk often whenever we get time (considering our busy life and timezone difference)

He is studying robotics and frequently sends me his designs and output with 3D printer.

About me, I left robotics(to be specific embedded) and got a job and working on backend these days.

Though, it's great talking to him and getting to know how the education goes there and his new works.

He also has a beautiful love story(not yet completed) which is another fun part to listen from him.

Last night I compiled my first kernel module!

I'm not talking about a ./configure; make; sudo make install kind of thing...

I wrote, compiled, loaded the module and saw my silly "Hello World!" message on dmesg!

Using some previous experience on embedded I fired up qemu with a fresh buildroot image and the kernel image I just made, thus I can now test and debug without doing kernel changes to my workstation!

So yeah, I'm a little excited :-D

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.

Our team is currently working with an Excel document that uses visual basic to talk to an embedded system. We're talking reading memory locations in Excel.

Not actually a rant, but need some place to vent it out.

The company where I work develops embedded devices enabling the automobiles to connect to the internet and provide various end user infotainment services. My job mostly relates to how and when we update the devices.

There are about 100 different
variants of the same device, each one different from the other in a way that the process required to update for each of these device variants is significantly Different. Doing this manually would be and actually was a nightmare for almost everyone, so I set out on writing a tool that addresses this issue.

I designed my solution mostly in Python, allowing me for quick prototyping. First of all, I'd never written a single line of python code in my life. So I learn python, in matter of 2 nights. I took days off from work so I could work on this problem I had in my head. And in about 4 days, I was up with a solution that worked, reliably. I prepared a complete framework, completely extendable, in order to have room for 101th variant that might come in at any time. And then to make it easier and a no Brainer for everyone, the software is able to automatically download nightly builds and update the test devices with nothing more than a double click.

But apparently this wasn't enough. Today I found out that someone worked on a different solution in the background just a week ago, while reusing most part of my code. And now they start advertising their solution over mine, telling everyone how crappy my code is. Seriously, for fucks sake, my code has been running without issues since more than a year now. To make it worse, my manager seems to take sides with the other guy. I mean I don't even have someone to explain the situation to.

I really feel betrayed and backstabbed today. I worked my days, my nights, my vacations on this code. I put blood, sweat and tears into this. I push my self over my limits, and when that was not enough, I pushed my self even harder. But it all seems in vain today. All the hours that I spent, just to make it easier for everyone... All a complete waste. When you write code with such passion, your code is like your family... You want to protect it... But with all this office politics and shit, I seem to be losing my grip.

I've been contemplating the entire night, where I might have gone wrong, what could I've done to deserve this...but to no avail. I'm having troubles sleeping, and I'm not sure what I should do next.

Despair, sheer bloody Despair!

I am having fun building a captured wifi portal. It shows up as "Virus Distribution Point" as an open AP. If you connect to the AP it brings up a page that looks like the picture.

It does nothing except show the page. The page will eventually do some limited javascript animation to make it look like it is doing something.

Right now it is an embedded webpage. Strings in a source file. Eventually I would like to turn this into a product of sorts that would make it easy for someone to use for advertising/pranks. So I expect I will need to create some sort of simple toolset for updating the pages and changing the SSID and the passcode (if any).

Got a new eval board. It came in with a stock firmware, had its own IP and naturally its own webGUI. I wanted to check what was under the hood. So I SSH'd in to the device, and was prompted to enter the username. There weren't any specs or documentation.

*Hmm, let's try root*
User: root
Password: *Eh? Well, what the heck* admin
.
.
.
root@evalboard#

Muhahaha!!! Meet your hacker, eval board!

I once saw this comment inside two embedded empty loop :

// WHY, OH GOD WHY!

Turns out somebody deleted the content but not the loop. The next dev added the comment but kept the loop.

!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...

I just noticed... a lot of people who are into tech also like anime. Is the love for anime just embedded into our technological souls?

Arduino is like Javascript for Microcontrollers

Blessed be the person whose comments/documentation is embedded with tiny pieces of code.

We are developing a single page APPLICATION which will be embeded into another single page APPLICATION using iframes (!?!?!?!). The embedded SINGLE PAGE application has POPUPS (browser instances, not UI popups) opened. Every app contains at least 75% of the other apps and they do not share common code. Everything in IE11 and ng4.

! 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.

Because of some requirements stated by an advertising agency I'm doing a job for, I need the SVG logo for the company I'm building a website.

I've been asking for more than 2 weeks for a single vector logo, be it AI, PDF, SVG or whatever.

They keep sending me 1GB of PSDs with NO VECTOR LOGO, only a really small one, embedded in a photograph together with tons of hidden layers.

Some designers are really great and do get things quickly, others are just potatoes.

Well done, T-Mobile!

They have an iOS app to handle contract stuff. That app integrates their shop system via an internal browser.
The shop notifies me, that the used browser is not supported by the shop...

Oh and the browser is an embedded safari on iOS 12.

Sales guy calls up from overseas and complains website we got developed from another vendor is not working.
Being just the middle man who project managed the website development with the offshore vendor, I had no clue what was wrong as the site was working fine and "worksforme" was not going to be acceptable answer for the costumer demo.
Being an embedded drivers guy, had no idea to debug this, except one:
Me: Which browser are you using?
Him: I.E
Me: try any browser other than I.E
Him: it works. Thanks
Boo yeah

UI Is the bane of my existence. I'm an embedded programmer i mainly deal with drivers daemons low level stuff no UI involved. why do they keep assigning mobile apps to me man ! #FML

Why do clients send everything embedded in a word document. Can you send me the jpeg? I receive a word document. (It's always word 2003 for some reason).

Pushed code remotely and told a teammate to run it on the target hardware. He then told me he might of blown up $6000 worth of equipment. Then he says "Never mind everything works."

World record for biggest heart attack?

Okay, first rant here.
Spend most of my morning searching for a js file that was supposed to build some graphs in a report page in this legacy system (still in active development) just to find it embedded inside a random .php file being included inside a wall of if-elses (that shit has around 100 lines) on the index.php (that somehow manages to route all the nonsense that's going on there).. was it really that difficult to make it a proper .js file? and actually import it on the page that is using it? c'mon...

What kind of developer are you and what is your opinion on other development areas?

Me: Junior dev, oriented towards full stack and Android(with a sysadmin background):

-Low-level(kernel development, embedded, drivers, operating systems, reverse engineers)- Badass, I wish I could do that.

-Mobile apps- awesome but too high level sometimes.

-Full stack/Backend- awesome.

-Web Frontend- fuck HTML+CSS. JS is cool I guess.

-Enterprise applications(e.g SAP) Pajeet, my son.

-Malware development- Holy shit that is awesome.

-Video Game development- was my dream since childhood.

-Desktop apps- No opinion.

!rant

Today, my true developer saga begins. First job as an embedded developer and I am prepared with my flaming dark themed rubber duck debugger. What could go wrong? :D

This is my first rant here, so I hope everyone has a good time reading it.

So, the company I am working for got me going on the task to do a rewrite of a firmware that was extended for about 20 years now. Which is fine, since all new machines will be on a new platform anyways. (The old firmware was written for an 8051 initially. That thing has 256 byte of ram. Just imagine the usage of unions and bitfields...)

So, me and a few colleagues go ahead and start from scratch.
In the meantime however, the client has hired one single lonely developer. Keep in mind that nobody there understands code!
And oh boy did he go nuts on the old code, only for having it used on the very last machine of the old platform, ever! Everything after that one will have our firmware!

There are other machines in that series, using the original extended firmware. Nothing is compatible, bootloaders do not match, memory layouts do not match, code is a horrible mess now, the client is writing the specification RIGHT NOW (mind, the machine is already sold to customers), there are no tests, and for the grand finale, the guy canceled his job and went to a different company. Did I mention the bugs it has and the features it lacks?

Guess who's got to maintain that single abomination of a firmware now?

What is the point of disabling the fullscreen button on a youtube video embed?

And funnily enough, I seem to find this on a lot of sites for software, that have a demo video embedded the page or some shit, like a screen recording in this tiny little frame where I can't read anything because it's in this 400 pixel wide box, that I can't fullscreen. I don't understand it at all! What purpose does it serve? You're actually encouraging me to leave your stupid site to view the damn video on youtube.com so I can actually read the text in your stupid ass video.

Why does youtube even give you the option to remove the fullscreen button in your embeds in the first place? They even recently removed some of the "modest branding" features, like hiding the title, or removing the recommended videos at the end, but they thought that this feature was valuable enough to keep?

This may seem irrational to complain about, but I'm confused and befuddled more than anything else? If I'm embedding a video on a website, the last thought I have in my mind is "Oh, I really don't want people to see my video fullscreen. Better make sure I disable that!"

I'm a bit weary of devRant being almost software-exclusive. I want to see more about hardware development here (and not just people playing with Arduinos)!

Electronics guys of devRant: Do you exist? What are you working on? Or is really everyone here a web developer?

(GIF related: My soldering irons heating up, the third one being my weekend project from last weekend. Seeing it coming in last, I'll probably have to tune its control parameters a bit more…)

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++ 😅

Second coolest project that I have worked was optimizing an algorithm that used images to speedup by 2000x by parallel processing. While the cpu took 7.34 seconds to process just one image and source, the parallel embedded code did it just in 0.0034 :) The coolest one is still in progress where I am building an Ai for my mac control ;)

Silently rebooting device every night cause of memory leaks in CEF.

Why is pointers... bit shifting.. malloc.. anything that is regarding embedded development is so hard to grasp...

Long live the embedded developer

First year: intro to programming, basic data structures and algos, parallel programming, databases and a project to finish it. Homework should be kept track of via some version control. Should also be some calculus and linear algebra.

Second year:
Introduce more complex subjects such as programming paradigms, compilers and language theory, low level programming + logic design + basic processor design, logic for system verification, statistics and graph theory. Should also be a project with a company.

Year three:
Advanced algos, datastructures and algorithm analysis. Intro to Computer and data security. Optional courses in graphics programming, machine learning, compilers and automata, embedded systems etc. ends with a big project that goes in depth into a CS subject, not a regular software project in java basically.

Created a batch file to modify some system files on our embedded system.

Accidentally double clicked it in my development main machine :(

Man, fm fucking l

Customer requested the implementation of a "Master PIN" Code for accessing their appliances, to be used by field technicians when the users forgot their PIN.
Actually they could also read or reset it via USB using the config utility, but then again it's much more convenient not having to carry a laptop all the time...

Our only contact person at that company - the guy we got all the requirements from, let's call him Mr. L - wouldn't talk only positive about the company and managers, but we never worried as the project was making good progress.

In the final phase of the project, Mr. L was often hard to reach, always seemed to be busy even when we just needed a prototype approved to start production.
He always claimed to be waiting for approval from his supervisors and engineers, still discussing minor things with them.

When he left the company about three months later, it turned out he was pretty much the only person knowing about the details of the project, and his successor would start asking us very basic questions about the appliance,
wondering why we had implemented certain things the way they were.
(Well, how about we implemented everything just as requested by a former co-worker of yours?!)

Somewhere in the preliminary specs previously exchanged with Mr. L, there is even a hint of a "Master PIN", but the value is never specified anywhere on paper.

Today, we are not sure if anyone except for him even knew about it.
Maybe we should ask them whether they are now selling a product that has a 4-digit backdoor PIN nobody at the company is aware of?

Obviously, it is the birth year of Mr. L.

Arguing with a co worker.... he is writing a serial data plotter, and wants me to send the data as text. I’m like ugh no I’m not wasting bandwidth for text data, you are getting it as binary, as my embedded system has a lot of other stuff todo than send debug info, so the quicker I get the data to you the better... plus his program is running on a pc there is no issue regarding resources handling binary data.

He tells me I’m am wrong, and is trying to defend his stance, then all the electrical engineers and other software engineers all stand up and said why in the hell would it be faster to send text than binary? He has no response.

I'd never imagine that my interests would shift from webapps and servers to embedded devices and measuring 500volts with an arduino....

Yeah! Have one week to write from scratch a standalone app with an embedded db that I've never worked with in an area that I have close to no knowledge and it's all my fault , wish me luck 🙏

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?

I started writing code at a young age, nodding games, building websites, modifying hex files, hacking etc... I started my career off tho in highschool writing embedded code for a local medical robotics company, and also got tasked with building the mobile app to control these robots and use them for diagnostics, etc.... this was before the App bubble, before there was app degree and that bullshit.. anyway graduated highschool, went to college to get a comp sci degree.
Wanted to teach for the university and research AI...

well I dropped out of college after 3 years, cuz I spent more time at work than in class. (I was a software consultant) in the auto industry in Detroit. I wasn’t learning anything I didn’t already know or could learn from books or a quick google search.
I also didn’t like the approach professors and the department taught software... way none of the kids had a good foundation of what the fuck they were doing... and everyone relied on the god damn IDEs... so I said fuck it and dropped out after getting in plenty of arguments with the professors and department leads.

I probably should have choose CE .. but whatever CS imo still needs a solid CE/EE foundation without it, 30 years from now I fear what will become of the industry of electronics... when all current gen folks are retired and nobody to write the embedded code, that literally ALLLLL consumer electronics runs on. Newer generations don’t understand pointers, proper memory management etc.

So I combined both passion AI and knowledge of software in general and embedded software, and been working on my career in the auto industry without a degree, never looked back.

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. 😕

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?

First it was the "set up WampServer so the client can use our database", to which I told her we should use an embedded database, to which she told me to do.

Then the "Just give the client a .jar file and install the JRE in his laptop" to wich I told her we can make a native installer, to which she fucking assigned to me.

Then the whole fucked up management thing with no design whatsoever and the "we don't need version control".

To just a few hours earlier, when she got mad because I set up a Slack for us to exchange information easily, she told me she was already mad because I shared the project by Google Drive and that she worked in security and knows the risk... AND AT THE SAME TIME, she uses Gmail to share the project.. BRILLIANT !

Currently i am working as a student at a teaching chair for embedded systems, so my boss is the professor there and the subject of this weeks story 😄

He is very passionate about his field and keeps close contact to the students and their representatives.
He invests a lot of resources into getting students to learn and make projects and pays us to supervise a hands on course for students to build IoT projects.
As employees we get to work on interesting projects and he listens to us and our concerns if we feel a project is having certain problems.

So I work on Embedded System. While working on my project I was drinking water from bottle.

And kept it near my laptop.

Just there all my circuits were open. Connected via USB with my laptop.
And while working I tried grab the bottle and guess what?
Yeah, It fell. But thankfully it didn't touch any of my circuits. If it did!!!!

I was frozen on spot.
Phew!!

client "it's ok we have a logo"

2 days later... receive a Word doc in an email with clients pixelated logo embedded

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)

Company is about to get certified to ISO 9001:

Kick-off meeting with consultant announced weeks ago, mandatory for all employees.
Everyone is kind of joking about it, but also looking forward to certain workflows maybe changing to the better.

Two hours before meeting, told by CTO not to attend.

Some code I hadn't touched for half a year needs urgent patching to make the equipment pass EMC test (doing so within a few hours would help us save the lab cost for another day of testing).

When they applied RF noise to the bus lines, the CAN peripheral would glitch and need reset, this should happen covertly the first few times without raising any error to the user, so they could just finish the testing without being disturbed by the error - and the EMC lab will not test the functionality of the device after all.

The irony when you were actually supposed to learn about quality that day...

I'm an embedded devices dev. As part of my job I take off the shelf devices and write libraries so that our JavaScript team can interface with them. If I have to deal with one more custom implementation of a standard protocol I'm going to freak the fuck out. Like fuck there are only 5 or so major communication protocols at the hardware level there is no fucking reason to reinvent some shittier protocol over a well documented, widely used protocol that has been around for 30 years. (Modbus for anyone who cares)

So pumped!! I just signed for my apartment for my first dev job starting this summer!

!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 ✌️

In highschool, I was looking around for schools and universities at which I would start my student career. I went to a grad school one day, to see what it was like to be a student there. The first class I visited was programming for embedded systems. We got the assignment to write Java code to control a boom barrier. The teacher had written the template. And I kid you not, the template had a method of around 20 lines of code - without comments - with the purpose of carrying out a logical OR operation. An operation that literally can be done using an operator in Java: |

Why oh why do they let these people teach, with the result that the students will get used to these bad practises...

Testers in my team have been told like 1000 times to follow the style guides that we all follow. That's not that big a deal. The big deal is that they were put on this project without having any mathematics background when the project is all about geometric stuff. So after me as a developer having to put so many hours to explain to them why the tests are not covering the requirements or why the tests are red because they are initializing the data completely wrong, I ask them pretty please to do the checks for the coding style and I have already been 4 hours reviewing code because not only I have to go through the maths and really obscure testing code to ensure that the tests are correct, but every line I have to write at least 4 or 5 style corrections. And some are not even about the code being clean, but about using wrong namespaces or not sticking to the internal data types. For fuck shake, this is embedded software and has to obey to certain security standards...

One of my interviews....
Interviewer: Do you know the welknown hack that increases the speed of embedded tomcat two times than default??
Me: what?? it even exists???
interviewer: yes... it exists... I know it... normally I share the answers with the interviewees... are you interested to hear the hack???
Me: Hell yeah...
Interviewer: ohh no... I will not share with you...
me: whyyy???
interviewer: I don't like your current boss...
Me: Fuck my life(inaudible)... facepalm..

So our new hardware guy who is being managed by our lead embedded developer had the task of designing me an expansion board for my Linux board. The Linux board uses the 40 pin expansion like the raspberry, bananna and orange pi family and as you all know there are many different types of expansion boards for this.
I said at the start come to me and tell me what you want to connect to before deciding which pin you connect to so it is less work for me with Linux board configs and drivers.............
No no no we will sort it all... erm.....
So today they come ask me if they can use an SPI port for GPIO and I am like erm... why there is plenty of GPIO...
It turns out they have been designing the board based on the pin outs of an expansion board and not the actual connector of the Linux board.. I mean seriously WTF!

it was my first job as an embedded engineer i was hired to write firmware for arm microcontroller that has ble radio. But the microcontroller we used didn't have FLASH it had a SRAM and an otp ( one time programmable) memory. In ble you can make a proximity beacon and When a phone passes by this beacon it will get a notification '<device_name> nearby'
. I thought it is funny if i keep device name 'MILF' (original name of device is FLIP ) so when somebody's phone is in proximity it will have a notification 'MILF nearby'. joke didn't work as nobody has their bluetooth switched on by default ,but i forgot to change it before programming otp memory.

i just buried that device and told everyone it is not working properly

So, here is the worst experience, not one.. but recent two of many of the encounters I had with my OOP teacher... (I am in Second Year of Engineering). Lets Call him T.
To give a background of T... He knows nothing but acts like he is the master... you'll get to know this...

Incident #0:
*me developing a website for a client and T just bumps in*
T: Hey, what are you upto.
M:Nothing sir, just some Web-dev stuff.
T: What languages do you use?
M: I am currently using embedded ruby.
T: No no, I meant, what languages do you use for web-dev?
*inner* M: Ok, try to act stupid... He is not worth of all the knowledge.
M: Sorry sir, I just use simple HTML-CSS.
T: Ohh, I use Wordpress... It's a great language to build websites.
*inner* M: He has no idea what WP really is, he is a fuckshit.
T: It's so simple and easy, that you code for Desktop view, press Ctrl-M and then it automatically makes it for mobile view.
*inner* M: Bursts out into laughter
M: OK sir, will look over it.

Incident #1:
*He is teaching, suddenly topic comes of Oracle Certification for Java*
T: I know many of you have idea about java, but do you have what it takes to be an OCJP..
*inner* M: LOL...
T: It is a really hard thing, and I can bet... I can bet *he did repeat that twice* that no one from you can even qualify OCJP.
*inner* M: It's time... It's time
M: Excuse me sir, first of all it's OCA... OCJP does not exist anymore... And secondly, I am an OCA...
*inner* M: Yeah... Fuck you bitch!
*assucimg inner* T:Fuck, asshole..$#@#%@!@$@%#

And whole class was like -> o.O

Yesterday, i had to use neovim for a task on my friend's laptop. There was no WiFi and I couldn't install Emacs. This guy uses Vim a lot. He recently moved to neovim from vim. He had some Ruby codes going. I had to debug some codes(performance issues). I was reluctant to work on it but i had to. After looking at some keybindings and the plugins that guy had written, using vim was pleasure. It was fast. I could shoot up multiple terminals work on that and was instant. I wrote some plugins to indent my code which worked as it's supposed to. I used spacemacs(as it's configured properly) Emacs but there is some load time on spacemacs and there are some issues shooting up multiple spacemacs on terminals. I had just configured and started using prelude which is beautiful Emacs configuration and is fast.
After using neovim that day something hit me that i had blindly had faith in Emacs without using Vim and i use Emacs only for text editing task and terminal. I don't use it for listening music, browser and other task i can always use modern browsers and Spotify for that. Modern browsers and music players are amazing and using those in Emacs there is always a lack of functionality and UI.(modern people don't use those i think and some Emacs users i know use stripped down version of Emacs i.e. microemacs or XEmacs.

I know vi is present by default on every Linux distribution. That keybindings are same as vim and it can be configured so, it is useful for embedded devices and system architecture. I love terminals and love working on tty. That's why i guess i felt instantly tempted to keep on using vim and i loved it's performance. I checked on evil layer before but there are some issues with evil layer in Emacs like it isn't too efficient like vim. I love lisp though and clojure can be edited nicely in Vim.

Is this sin against the church of Emacs? Should i join vi vi vi? I have already dedicated my life on Emacs (check my bio). Am i tempted by the devil?

So I'm taking embedded systems subject in my masters course. They have mixed this subject's content with electrical engineering and I'm a computer science graduate. Everything was perfect until I reached to GPIO board.
Wtf is this shit?
Why it has so many holes and what are they for?
What I'm supposed to do with it?
What is ground? Transistor?
Why I'm connecting to two pins only instead of the 4 pins of a button?

Thanks to pi4j i think i will pass the subject!

My wife often listen my rants about stupid clients, she thinks that I hope to much from them. Like image as actual image not fucking embedded in word document.
Today she agreed to help her friend and make name cards for tables. Got list of names ;) one photo of paper with hand written names on it :D

bool firstRant = true;

Hey all,
I've been lurking for a few weeks. I just got my first ever full time position as an embedded systems programmer for a small-ish company. For context, my background is with application devlopment, not embedded systems, so I am surprised I even got the position.

Regardless, I am kind of pissed off because the pay is only like $13.50 an hour (I live in California, the minimum wage here is $11.00 an hour.) I think it is bullshit but this job is my best option. Im still fucking salty and I know people woth internships that pay $20 an hour.

Not too long ago, I was looking over my friend’s HTML with embedded CSS code. He had two separate style tags. I looked at him and asked: “Why do you have two style tags?”

He responds: “Because I’m a lazy boi”

Anyone else enjoy "uncropping" images embedded in MS Office documents? People cropping out other windows/tabs from full screenshots... I've seen some weird stuff!

It's not unusual to be sent documentation / screenshots saved as MS Office documents (Word, PowerPoint etc.). Kinda annoying but whatever.

When a Field Tech emails you about a problem and the screenshot is embedded in a Word Document. WTF, why can't they send it as a f'ing jpeg, gif, or IDK a png?

BAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Today I'm beginning my third year of Bachelor in embedded computing. And just as last year, I'm bored as fck. "Learning" the same stuff over and over, and wasting my time when I could be at work as a PHP developer ... FML

Master linux
Master vim
Quit frontend
Get a job in embedded development

Saying Java is good because it runs on 3 billion devices is the same like saying mass public transport is good because it carry billions of people.

Who need arrays anyway...

There are several categories of software development that I know of: front-end, back-end, full-stack, game, mobile, embedded etc., but what is the term for developing libraries and/or CLI utilities in languages like C++, Python, Go etc. that are not related with any of the above? System development doesn't seem wrong but I was wondering what's the correct term for it in the industry because I need to mention it in my resume and on LinkedIn.

Also, if there's a lesser-known category that you work on then do tell us all about it 🙂

It was in old days when I was working in java and windows systems.

Java and different log4j versions across dependencies caused system not working only on production server.

Turned out some of libraries got log4j embedded and conflicted with other log4j.

It worked in all computers except production one.

Actually that was my main reason to switch my career to python after that dependency hell.

Another one was windows server 2008 tcp connection limit set to 200 or something.
We needed to change registry to get our servers working. After this case we finally managed to convince people to switch to linux.

Anyway any non standard error when you got multiple layers communicate with each other is hard, practice make it easier to solve those problems as your success moment comes faster.

Today we had a cryptolocker running through our file servers. The locker came from a mailicious e-mail from a strange address. The email contained a strange pdf file with an embedded docm file. 6 people out of a workplace of 80 opened that file. These people...

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.

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?

After working with so many platforms and languages i think OpenSuse and QT5 is the best option for developing desktop/mobile/embedded solutions

> Be me
> Programming for an embedded system
> It's not interruptable
> Got ISR Fault (Interrupt Service Register)
> WTF
> Breakpoints are useless
> WTF
> Comment out some lines
> Turns out it goes ISRF Infinite Loop because of the multi dimensional array of strings
> WTF
> Use pointer intead of defining actual size
> Works
> WTF

WTF?

Today's GDPR-Bullshittery.

So we are using an open source remote update system for updating our embedded devices.
And today we learned that, that system logs ip-adress'. And low and behold mr.GDPR says that is a no no.

So either we completely drops it, finds a new update system and implements it..
Sift through all the source code of the update system "fix" it and recompile it.
Or we setup a Man in the middle attack on ourselves. To mask the ip-adress'.

GDPR encouraging hacking ourselves I fucking love it!

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

Customer: URGENT, we are not receiving any email. (that's actually a really urgent issue)

Turns out that customer had an invalid base64 embedded image in is signature which was causing our system to crash.

Made invalid images move to oblivion and told the customer the issue was solved :D

Developer vs non developer interview:

Non developer:
How well do you know excel ?

Developer:
How would you write spreadsheet app, what if it was cross platforms mobile application but also desktop app ?

Non developer:
Do you know how to use windows?

Developer:
Do you know kubernetes, distributed systems, lambdas, cloud services and how to deploy to server farm ?

Non developer:
You know how to use printer / fax and coffee machine ?

Developer:
Do you have experience in writing code for embedded devices ?

Non developer:
Do you know powerpoint ?

Developer:
How well do you know javascript / html / css, are you comfortable with writing backend node.js code or electron applications ?
React native and native apps maybe ?

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

Architect: I've been using this architecture for 20 years now and this works nice since pascal, that's why we are using it in this J2EE app.

This was the justification that I received after hearing that I shouldn't use exceptions, just make the function return a false and add the error message to a embedded message list and make the caller capture it.

Here is a story about 5 years of my life.
My studies had little to do with web. I did embedded systems (architecture and software) but quickly realized that I couldn't see myself living my life in my homecoutry and that my degree would be worth little to no more than shit elsewhere in the world. That was on my 3rd year in uni.
I liked coding so I decided to pursue computer science, then web development. For that, your degree mattered little.
From then on, when I wasn't in class I was doing some coding.
This allowed me to get short (2 months) internships in Mobile and web development, 4 in total.
Doing so I had made it so that my professors would allow me to do my graduation project in web and mobile dev. That project having ended, I secured a long (1year and a half) internship in Mumbai India doing web for a big consulting company. Having finished that I headed to Belgium for my current job. All with having no to little financial resources except what I could come up with.
"I'm proud of all the efforts it took to make it" is what I think sometimes but what is it that I made? I realized my first objective which is to be on the international job market, but now that I genuinely love software I realize that I didn't really make anything I can be proud of working as a consultant. And having worked on many things but not a lot on practically anything, it's getting hard to do something else.
I'm hoping for devranters insight on how I should proceed.

I give software support to Rugged handhelds in a company and everyday some IT support moron comes to me with a crazy request. The day just started and...

IT Tech: "Hello, C, can you improve the touchscreen sensibility? It's not so responsive and sometimes we have to click more than one time to something work"

**breath in**

Me: "That's ok, the rugged ones that you have are very old, besides they have resistive screen, so your fingers won't do a good job"

IT Tech: "THERE'S NO WAY TO FIX IT? I guess I'll open a ticket for you to study more calmly about the issue"

**NGGGGGGGGGHHHH**

Me: "If it's not a software thing, I can't do that, I don't have hardware skills, I guess you'll have to call our provider about that, but, before you do something, try to recalibrate your handhelds, the majority of the users don't do that at the system's start and the touch experience really can become a mess"

IT Tech: "Hmmm, I'll try that, otherwise I'll back to you, thanks!"

OMFGGGGG

I am open to suggestions of a magic batch file/ .NET CF 2.0 software that will turn their handhelds into a Galaxy S6 touch experience. THANKS!

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!😊

The application that was working fine on local host failed to do one task which is to read users data from excel and save it on mongo db, in some collection document's embedded document. My last night and today morning was tensed due to this. So I decided to re deploy the same application on another instance that I have. Worked completely fine
😐😐😐

I have a pretty successful project on github

Which I don't think is necessarily my best achievement but all the stuff I do at work is not open

I used the project as a way to learn bash scripting and it kinda caught on.
Sadly I'm not a sys admin or anything I'm more of hardware/embedded engineer but it's still cool to have one of my projects being so used. And I got to learn a little of bash along the way 😁 I now feel super comfortable in a terminal and reading man pages to figure things our which was a skill i lacked previously. I definitely learn better by doing and fixing mistakes along the way

I was working with my embedded systems friend a few days ago on a website, and since we work with electronics, it was something new.

I then went home and started learning web development.

Holy shit I love it

I will continue to until it’s time to know about JavaScript

Windows Embedded in a bus stop, ok

Now everyone were sharing their worksetup I thought I would want too to.
So here it is.
I have two laptops (one belongs to startup I work at) I use same keyboard mouse for both using synergy.
I have my editor and node server in one laptop and I check them out on other laptop (both are medium range laptop hence they are not exactly powerful). I am running Linux mint in both.

Then I have some embedded stuff on desk which is my hobby(currently working on esp8266 dev board that I built).

You can also see a projector clock I built projecting current time on left beside my bigger laptop. (Projection is on wall beside it)

*embedded rant*
Boss finds new chinese supplier for the lcds we use and tells me to make one work so we can see the new quality. All is good.. the lcd works. But at some point I start seeing some defects. Pretty annoying defects.
Boss tells me to explain the defects to the chinese engineers so that they can either fix it or tell us if we did something wrong. So I do it. I explain everything in detail as one engineer to another.
An hour after I submit the email I get called. The boss is furious that the email is bs. His reasons .. " We are working with cheap-ass chinese. None of their engineers know english. How do you expect anyone to understand all that stuff you said?!"
ffs.. i had to dumb it down to 5th grade english..

Joomla 1.5 with a custom PHP CMS embedded using Iframes 😥

Good News: WordPress has decided to update its embedded jQuery version to the latest as of Version 5.0

Bad News: Decided to look up what else to expect with that update, find out the Gutenberg editor is on its way to replace the TinyMCE editor, and will be sweeping meta boxes away along with it...

So today (as of 5 min ago) marks a great day for my personal projects! I just got my embedded systems Flash memory driver debugging on my PC in Visual Studio, talking directly to the REAL flash chip, WITHOUT being tied to a embedded target! It's glorious. I can finally debug and write tons of tests without having to worry about the constraints of my embedded system. Ahhh. All the pieces I've needed to build this have slowly come together over weekends, and it feels so good to have this tool in my arsenal now! Great day indeed.

Did I really go to university, have object oriented programming taught to me from scratch and embedded in me as best practice, work with OO frameworks for 3 years and become a damn good web dev just to use Drupal?

I have a random question. Does it make me a less of a developer if I say no to a embedded side project proposed by a friend?
I mean I'm all into side projects n building something cool but hardware and embedded stuff isn't something I like or feel passionate about.

My area of focus: Low-level programming (refered as to down-to-metal programming)

Why?
Because as a little kid, I was so done using crappy unoptimized software. That was my original motivation, but now it's because optimizing routines and learning how everything works in general is fun. Even for things like Xlib (which is a pain in the ass to use, at first), but when you master it, you get that juicy performance. When I go really low level, like where cpu cycles matter I mix up C and Assembly (because I don't want my printf to be 40 lines of code). How is this applicable to any of the current programming needs, I don't know. Maybe embedded systems?

Is there any hope of getting a job that isn't web related? Every embedded job I've seen requires years of experience. I just want to write C dammit.

I really hate when I have to work on something wrong. I mean, the client wants to embedded a third party service on their website, using iframe. Then, they want us to change the layout and behavior of the embedded page. And well, no matter what, I have to do what they want. Great job.

Website for a gallery that wanted a 10k website for just 1k ... Must haz super CMS so that they could send me word documents each week so I could manuallly copy paste that shit into the CMS, and somehow extract and restore the lowres embedded images in full resolution ...

I guess it was safe to say this was my first client from hell 😅😂😂😂

The second was a website for some ballroom dude that got my referral from gallery X ... Yup, same shitty type of client

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.

What do I say to a friend who asks "when there is embedded c, why not embedded python" ?

NODE CRYPTO YOU PUSS RIDDEN CANCEROUS CYST ON THE SWEATY BALLSACK OF THE INTERNET... fucking explain to me how every mother fucking module in node with require(‘crypto’) in it throws a hissy fit at runtime when I call only 1 file with it in it?! These packages that I’m not fucking using by the way but are nonetheless included by default in node are the ones having a meltdown.. and nodes answer?! Use the embedded functions. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!! If I didn’t need it Node could go and get gang raped by an angry pack of silverback gorillas. Fuuuuuuucccckkkkk yoouuuuu

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?).

Today is just me and my friend, two embedded systems geeks making a website.

It’s going awful but it’s fun as hell😂

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 🤓

You may soon have a new operating system from Google to run on your Raspberry Pi. Details are still extremely sparse, the only description on the GitHub page is “Pink + Purple == Fuchsia (a new Operating System)”. But, here’s what we do know:

The new OS, called Fuchsia, will be based on Magenta, which is in turn built on LittleKernel. That means that, surprisingly, Google will not be using a Linux kernel for the new OS but something more like an embedded RTOS. Although Google is targeting embedded systems, the possibility of being able to run it on a desktop has been mentioned, so it may not be too minimalistic.

Google’s Travis Geiselbrecht has named the Raspberry Pi 3 specifically as one system it will run on, and said that it’ll be available soon. But, it seems Google is aiming to make it run on a variety of ARM devices (both 32 bit and 64 bit), as well as 64 bit PCs. This is a direct effort to compete against other commercial embedded operating systems that are currently available, and especially on IoT devices.

I set up an issue tracker for a software I'm developing for a company. Sent them an invitation to that tracker, stating that I hope to keep discussions more concise and clear that way (they're all HW/Embedded Devs)

The good news is: they've taken to the tracker quite well and are happily reporting issues and discussing them.

The bad news is: they're all sharing a single account.

It's been up for a day now and already no one knows anymore who reported/commented what.

WHY, JUST WHY would you think it's a good idea to share an account between 5 people, maybe more, who knows? Creating one takes less than a minute and it's free ffs.

>Working on code
>Shit works as intended first try, nice
>Goes to play strange bootleg Gameboy Color ROM sent by a friend
>ROM immediately fucking dies
wtf.svg
>Pop emulator's debugger
we're executing from VRAM, stack's firmly embedded in ROM
>why
>Add execution breakpoint to entrypoint of game, restart emulated system (because i'm actually using the legit bios i hacked so it allows null/corrupted games to run)
>Step through everything, everything goes well until all of a sudden we call a function and shit hits the goddamn fan
well we have the culprit
>step through subroutine
if <unused_byte_in_HRAM> != 0 then stackPointer+=32;tryAgain();else return
>***y***
>Realize this is using a bootleg Memory Bank Controller with hard-backed encryption so none of the bytes executed or read as data are the right byte
>Find emulator that'll handle the jank MBC
>read code to try and figure out how it works
if checksumExtendedLogoBlob == some_number then set MBC_Bootleg1 else if checksumExtendedLogoBlob == some_other_number then set MBC_Bootleg2 else if...
>of course
>Spend 10 minutes finding the right bootleg MBC
>code shows 8 possible tables for real bit order based on some value in the cart header
>look for code that gets this value
>not in the header
>not in ANY header in this 1000+ file emulator
>not in any related cpp files???
>get desperate
>email author
>"Delivery failed: email doesn't exist"

fuck me i guess

So I went to a car repair center and asked if they could fix my bike. They said they could but they won't. This is outrageous, obviously a bike is less complicated than a car and they can actually fix it, they just won't because it's "not their job". Unbelievable!

//This didn't really happen of course
//people don't think this is acceptable, but if I won't fix their laptop they are surprised and act the same way. I study ICT (embedded software engineering and cyber security, but they don't understand that so ICT it is) so I HAVE to fix their laptop....
//Non-techies should really learn that just because we can do something, we don't have to do what they ask of us

ESNext (next version of JavaScript) — because no matter what I do, as long as I'm working with web technologies, JavaScript is king. My career has evolved from UI-focused work, primarily working with JavaScript, yet I've also worked on embedded platforms and even operating systems! JavaScript is my foundation and you must always remember your roots!

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!

Any electrical engineers/tech hackers here?

I am planning to do raspberry & arduino project, basically it’s TV ambilight, but with camera recording the tv screen. Now I have a lot of stuff figured out already, will use wide angle camera connected to raspberry (so I can use it very close to the tv), it’s gonna record screen at lowest resolution which should be enough to analyze colors through opencv and has quite high bitrate. Behind the tv will have led strips around with arduino hooked, which has wifi shield connected.

Now key here is to capture image, analyze it, build array of colors and send it to the arduino to change the colors of led and everything 60 times per second (fps to match tv).

Amount of data is 0.3kb with 100 24bit leds, which is incredibly low.

I am not entirely sure how wifi works internally, but will it be handle to transfer data 60x/s, where not the size is the problem but actually the amount of transfers done? I should also take into account all other appliances using the wifi (pc, philips hue, phone...).

Or will it be more reliable to hook led’s directly to raspberry through wire (which’s also a cheaper option)?

First patch for buildroot submitted and added applied to master!! 😁

I had the impression that git (like, more than "git add ." was just too complicated and that making patches was some sort of dark magic using some obscure unix tools.

Well, it turns out that is actually pretty easy, fun and exhilarating!!

Looking forward to build up until I'm making contributions to the kernel! 🤓

Reminder, include legal language in next project that says if we're using JIRA then we're using JIRA and not a thousand emails with requirements embedded in spreadsheets and PowerPoints.

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

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

The worst technology i had to deal with was probably a piece of hardware. It was a mini-pc combined with sensors and digital IOs and thus, it should have been able to do process control all by itself.

At that time, there was hardware that did that, but this one had an intel cpu, windows embedded and some powerful libraries pre-installed.

Sounds good, didn't work. The thing was so unstable and buggy and crashed on everything. The sensor part had lots of parameters and the right order was trial and error, documentation didn't match behavior, fixes promised but never delivered.

Lucky for us: it was just a demokit, no real project.

I still remember it with a smile. We got in contact to that company at a trade fair and they had most impressive booth. I also remember their companies image movie from their homepage with developers in dark labs with holographic monitors and the boss in his shiny bright office as he looked out of the window and quoted a famous german author.

Hilarious and sad. :-)

Html5 vs Adobe flash. Html5 won
Html5 vs java Web embedded app. Html5 won
Therefore Html5 vs java 3 billion devices. Ans=?

Today at work I started doing 1 month old task with production problem.

First of all why now ?
Because I already fixed all the other urgent production problems I had during last month, done about 4 deployments of those super urgent errors.
Now I can start with not trivial one that are pending for quite time.
I am the only backend developer in this project ...

This is a dtp application and the problem is that we are not verifying if we got all fonts embedded in customer provided pdf files.

We are generating high quality images of those pdf for printing just fine from the beginning but now we need valid PDF with all fonts embedded in it. ( don’t ask me why I am only a hammer in this process )

After running simple test using python script against database it turned out we have over 500 broken PDF files without fonts.

So I guess I have just one sentence to say about it.

Fuck you PDF format for not being strict and allowing this shit.

Whenever i get bored at work i try to motivate myself, because i notice that as soon as i am less interested, i loose focus and make mistakes.

Therefore i try to keep motivation up. One thing that helps is actually TDD, because you are able to have several small subgoals, which each leave you with a feeling of achievement, when a test you wrote passed, kinda like achievements in games.

When the task itself is so boring that even TDD doesn‘t help, i try to have fun while painfully working through it. Like have a coffee break every now and then or rant with a coworker about the task.

One time a coworker and me had to create a demo in Unity and we hated the task, because it was exactly this brainless and cumbersome clicking in the Unity3D UI which felt awful to us (we are embedded developers and we find comfort in the terminal 😄)
The only thing that got us through the task was ranting at Unity and periodically goofing around in the engine and adding weird behavior to objects.

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!

I'm worried that this question will probably get downvoted on SO and I cannot post from my account as well, so here it is..

How to play youtube embedded video in mobile over a custom button / svg / image ?

One idea I'm currently working on is to trigger &autoplay=1 onclick but it is only appending that parameter to existing URL?

Please let me know if you have any thoughts, and I'm doing this for only mobile devices only

P.S I cannot use YouTube API

Soo question for the few embedded engineers on here. Do you guys use microchip’s, or NXP’s SDK for the hardware drivers? Or do you read the ref manual and build the HAL and PAL drivers per the need of the project for less code bloat and saving code space.

I and my coworkers always end up writing the drivers ourselves , so we have a better understanding of the specific hardware of the chip. Just trying to see if We’re the majority or the minority of embedded engineers.

Not really sure how many embedded folks are even on here.

And no not talking about RasPie, and arduino folks (no offense)

At work we develop for embedded systems. Using the heap can raise unknown effects sometimes. So we always try to avoid using it. To show our attitude regarding the heap we want to make T-Shirts like the No Ma'am shirts from Married... with Children but with No Heap instead of No Ma'am. Now we need a meaning of the acronym. Our currently idea is:

Nerdy
Opponents of
HEAP
E
Allocation
Practice

We do not find a good word for the E, we also aren't native speaker, thus we are not sure which synonym for word like based can be used in such context. So i want to ask if someone has a good idea or even a better idea for the whole acronym :)

Does everyone here either is a web related developer? It seems like embedded software developers are a rare kind in this place.

Now that I've spent a few ineffectual hours too many trying to get it working, I'm starting to think VS Code wasn't built for the purposes I wanted to use it for. I still can't get breakpoints working anywhere close to reliably. And I'd say breakpoints are pretty important.

On a related note, if anyone here has used VS Code together with arm-none-eabi-gdb, I'd love some pointers. I've yet to find any traces on the web of people doing that…

Much like traditional engineering I can see software engineering suddenly becoming very very regulated around the world. Different systems safety bodies will open up for things like embedded systems development where their is a risk of harm, mandatory security standards will be put in place etc.

Enjoy the cowboy days ladies/gents/others regulatory bodies are on their way!

Emscripten is a bitch to work with, you have no fucking idea.

1. It will not work on a 64 bit system if you are working with linking multiple libraries that depend each other, as size gets fucked up. (3 months wasted, tried this on and off)

2. When compiling to WebAssembly, the .wasm file it outputs is actually unrunnable. You need a .js file along with it, to pass environment variables to the WebAssembly instance. However, these two files are seperate, so you can't really get them to a user through a CDN. My ugly fix was after the file was compiled, running a Node script that read each byte, turned it into a literal number array ("example" => [123,124,125...]). This puts the final .js size at around 3 fucking megabytes.

3. Emscripten's built in Uglify is fucking shit. In Emscripten, you can embed JS code into C code using EM_ASM. It looks like this -

EM_ASM({
// embedded code starts here
function hello() {
console.log("world")
}
hello()
// end of embedeed code
})

Does that look valid JS? I think it does. However, Emscripten kept rejecting it and I was confused as fuck. I turned off the JS optimizer/validator that Emscripten uses, and voila it compiled. Boot it up in a browser, and an error is thrown.

"Missing ; at line x"

So it turns out the code got minified anyway, just not validated. Now, when you minify the above code, you would expect to see something like

function hello(){console.log("world")};hello()

Right. Low and behold, nope.

function hello(){console.log("world")}hello()

It just put all my code together onto one line, no semicolons. I know it's a meme to say the compiler is broken, but that's not normal. I fixed the shit by adding semicolons myself. Took me hours to figure out.

4. Emscripten uses a modifier version of SDL, in which the definitions of variables there conflict with standard library variables. My linter lost it's mind. A good week to track down an correct by disabling SDL.

5. Said this in a previous rant, but C++ mangles function names, so when you try to access them from JS, they're not there. Questioned my sanity once more. Took a few more days to fix.

I love you, but get your shit together, Emscripten.

More network/hardware than dev but anyway: I use OPNsense as a firewall at home on an embedded system. Had everything set up nicely and appearing to be working fine, quite a lot of things set up (static leases, VLANs with various firewall rules etc. - a fair bit of stuff involved). I noticed my remote system was failing to back up to my local one. Turned out port forwarding wasn't fully working (initial packet got through but nothing else). I noticed this at midnight.

Ran an update to see if that helped - nope. Reboot time then! It made its shutdown noises and I waited 15 minutes before giving up (no noises, no ping response). Took SD card out. Copied a fresh install onto it, thus wiping all settings. Booted up fine, set up my internet connection, all good. Proceeded to configure it. Noticed I couldn't access the internet from my PC, but could from the firewall itself. Rebooted the firewall. It didn't come back up. Argh!

Reinstalled AGAIN. Attached a serial cable and it was complaining about something which sounded like it couldn't read the SD card. Tried another. Nope. Looked online (using phone): known issue to do with boot delays.

Gave up and went to bed at this point (4am).

Next day: Installed it in a VM instead. Still no internet from my PC! Another known issue to do with default gateway not being the PPPoE interface. Got into shell, manually changed the default route. Was then able to update to the latest version which fixes the gateway issue. Rebooted the VM. All good.

Put all my settings back in, this time taking a backup afterward.

Only to discover....

....port forwarding wasn't working properly. Back to square 1.

Poked around with some NAT settings (outbound ones), made no difference, undid those changes and suddenly it started working.

WTF? /waves arms in the air

OPNsense folk were very helpful, producing a new build for me to try within a couple of hours of me asking about the problem.

But days like that, I start to question whether I really enjoy technology as much as I thought I did...

Would you like a Raspberry Pi ? If yes, what kind of project would you like to do with ?

I’ve been on devRant for a very short period of time and I’ve seen too many posts about PHP fucking people in the ass.

Is it really that bad?(I’m an embedded systems geek so don’t ask me why I don’t know anything about PHP)

When it gets embedded