jvanderbot

I'll start. A colleague would be politely suggesting designs or changes, but rolling with the punches when people disagreed. They were always proven right eventually, and it was usually because someone wandered into a…

If you were to build a remote operated ham shack for UHF/VHF, what would you choose? Ideally I could use a cheap base station or mobile station, hook up a pi, add tail scale, and run some software on my laptop to…

I have a street where cars travel a bit too fast sometimes, and a family cabin where boats do too. I think it'd be fun to plot speeds and courses, just for science, so to speak. By "build" I mean make an antenna, signal…

I'm making a TTRPG, and the skill system involves lots of synergy hierarchies, and interactions. It involves rules that are easy to express in code, but just complicated enough that Excel is very cumbersome. Add to that…

I've met and read articles by a lot of JS devs who are enamored with Rust. I love Rust and c and c++ because I work at systems level and sometimes in backend for robotic systems. Even in these domains, uptake of rust is…

I'm trying to remember a story. The story is about a networking or computer science conference. To provide fast wifi to the conference attendees, they made a laser comms link from across the street (or a few streets,…

Algs/DS were my first love in CS. Nowadays, all we hear about is AI/ML. There must be hardware/software improvements coming from or necessitating fundamental Algs/DS research. Care to share any of the favorite recent…

I was getting some bash script help from copilot, and it happily wrote 90% of the script, and included author, date, and download link. # Download: <pause and copilot added the link to githubusercontent.com/XXX #…

There's lots of choices once your first job is past. Management, IC, family time, money, industry vs academia, etc. Any advice?

I'm aware of Matter, but it appears geared towards ZigBee-enabled devices. I'm also looking into more home automation, open-source software. What stacks or standards should a local-only IoT device be compliant with?

I'm interviewing at many places, and some are beginning to do layoffs, often large (20% in one case). How would you approach this situation if you were job hunting?

I'm at Amazon at the moment, previously JPL. While I don't really think talking specifics of tech would be welcome by either employer, I'd love to hear experiences, even via newsletter, of folks in my specific role.

Moving companies have derivative names (Safeway, Safe Way, Safe Way Systems), copy-paste reviews, wildly varying quotes, unclear ownership, and almost universally negative reviews. Because of how many different brokers,…

ESP seems to have a strong open source following, is quite popular. Is it becoming the best choice for new embedded mcu / iot projects? I'm returning to the embedded world after a 5-year hiatus and Expressif has really…

I'm generally a C, Rust, C++ programmer with a focus on embedded systems and robotics. I'm quite familiar with Robot Operating System (ROS). Its sweet spot as middleware is a single system with many processes and…