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Small tech companies tend to be design or engineering led. Organizations grow and evolve, and as they become large they become marketing or finance led.

I too have tried to use a USB power bank as a kind of DIY UPS to power a Raspberry Pi SBC. What I learned - which may be unrelated to your experience - is that all of the several p…

I wrote a blog article on this very topic several years ago: https://coverclock.blogspot.com/2012/12/passion-practice-pro...

Yes, lots of them. I hate reading on the screen, enough that I own a color laser printer more or less just to print articles that I want to read that are online. But for the most p…

Being able to get feedback can be both a pro and a con, depending on the nature of the feedback. Sometimes you can use information asymmetry to your advantage; thinking in public m…

I also have a MacBook Pro and a GPD Micro PC. The latter is ideal for taking into the field (in the case of my GPS work, literally a field) to connect to the various pieces of hard…

Historically, this is what people have used public libraries and university libraries for. They're typically not internet-free spaces, but a little discipline on the user's part so…

Some time ago I wrote a blog article about the lab notebooks I use. https://coverclock.blogspot.com/2008/07/daily-organization.h...

I'm an embedded/real-time/systems software developer. The realms I work in tend to be either the very small or the very large. When I wanted to learn Rust and Go, I coded the same …

We were lucky that the recent tragic Marshall fires in the Boulder Colorado area didn't directly affect us, even though our home was near the boundary of a pre-evacuation area. But…

"Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations" by Robert Austin [Dorset House, 1996]. Austin, who at the time he wrote this was an executive with Ford Motors Europe, was wor…

Related: my Hazer (com-diag-hazer) LGPLv2 repo, which makes extensive use of Diminuto, is my go-to tool for evaluating GPS/GNSS/IMU devices or building geolocation tools. I do use …

At last count I have 36 repos on GitHub - some private - but by far the one that has been the most useful is my Diminuto (com-diag-diminuto) LGPLv2 repo that is a library of C/GNU/…

Everyone has their own preferred mode of learning. Mine is hands on, learning by doing. I can't learn new material just by reading a book (although I have friends and colleagues th…

1. I can only learn by doing. If I can't turn it into a project, then I'll never internalize the details, and cannot really claim to have learned anything. 2. For it to be a projec…

I do embedded, real-time and distributed product development for clients in the commercial, enterprise, aviation, defense, and big science domains. I probably own two dozen Pis of …

Unless you're a computer scientist studying algorithms, probably not. But when I defended my Master's thesis in CS way back in 1983 - yes, I'm that old - my fiancee[1] gave me the …

"Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations" by Robert D. Austin, Dorset House, 1996. Changed my entire world view. The basic idea - which Austin arrives at using an offsh…

MEASURING AND MANAGING PERFORMANCE IN ORGANIZATIONS by Robert D. Austin Austin, who is now on the faculty of Harvard Business School, wrote this seminal book on measurement dysfunc…

I'm a little surprised at the number of people that are saying "paper" or "printer". I agree. The technology to read complex technical topics online just isn't there yet, remarkabl…

It's very rare for me to read a technical book cover to cover. I recently read IPv6 FUNDAMENTALS by Graziani (Cisco), but that was more an act of desperation. The best CS-related b…

1. Started working full time at 19. 2. Still alive at 60. 3. Worked hard in every job. 4. Maximized retirement contributions. 5. Only owned two houses. 6. Paid off current home as …