Amateurs discuss Prototypes. Professionals talk Process.
Sat, Mar 21, 26
One of my former Sonos colleagues once told me the single wisest thing I’ve ever heard about hardware product development:
Figure Out Firmware Updates First
Fri, Jun 21, 24
Most of the software I’ve written and released to the world is firmware. It’s increasingly apparent to me, as I write more and more of it, that you should figure out how to ship a firmware update first, before you spend too much time on feature work. Or, really, anything else in your firmware. Why? Because it accretes so much value over time to be able to push updates quickly. It’s agile, and not in the project management sense. It gives you a vehicle to make quick updates and iterate rapidly. Lest I be accused of regurgitating buzzwords here, I’ll be real specific about my meaning:
The ease of picking up web development is greatly exaggerated
Mon, Jun 19, 23
I quit my job in July 2021, and started writing a webapp for something to do. (Are you an FPGA engineer, and looking for a new job? Check us out at www.FPGAjobs.com.) I had assumed, as a credentialed engineer and longtime HN lurker, that picking up web development was going to be pretty easy. I was absolutely wrong. Here’s why.
Things I Wish I'd Done Differently Building a Niche Job Board
Wed, May 25, 22
I’m closing in on a year - a whole dang year!! - of working on RTLjobs.com. It’s a job board for FPGA and RTL engineers. (If you’re an FPGA engineer, and looking for a new gig, I’d love it if you signed up for our mailing list.)
Ten Lessons from a Decade in Engineering
Mon, May 09, 22
I recognized last week that it’s been ten years since graduating from Montana State University. I have learned a vast amount in the field that I never learned in school. Here are ten things I’ve learned from a decade working as an electrical engineer.
More notes on writing web scrapers
Fri, Feb 25, 22
I got a lot of great feedback from my first post about writing a web scraper for RTLjobs.com. The months since then have produced a ton more work, and a ton more learning about web scraping. Here’s round two of what I’ve learned about scraping and indexing web results.
I Think I Know Why You Can't Hire Engineers Right Now
Wed, Jan 12, 22
It’s always been hard to hire engineers, but it’s only gotten harder in recent months. Read any publication that cares about business, from the NYT to the Wall Street Journal, and you’ll see a ton of hand wringing about The Quittening, and the accompanying talent shortage. An equal amount of ink has been spilled about how red-hot the hiring market is. It’s a seller’s market for talent. This represents a huge potential opportunity for engineers of all stripes. Many engineers could pick up a five figure raise by switching companies right now. In spite of that, it doesn’t seem like many engineers are choosing to make the jump. Why is that?
Growing Your Mailing List By Being Helpful
Thu, Dec 09, 21
I’ve been working on www.RTLjobs.com, a niche job board for HDL engineers, for about three months. My biggest challenge, by far, is getting people who need it to know that it exists. Reddit has become one of my primary channels to get the word out about www.RTLjobs.com. It’s netted the most mailing list signups by a country mile; I would guess that about 70% of the mailing list signups have come from Reddit users.
Some guidelines for writing web scrapers
Thu, Dec 02, 21
I’ve been working on www.rtljobs.com, a job board for RTL and FPGA engineers, since September. Right now, RTLjobs is an aggregator. We index open FPGA/RTL roles at a number of companies, check them for relevance, and post them to our site. I’ve already written two job scraping systems to help ease the work of indexing jobs. Here’s some general rules I’ve come to hold for writing web scrapers and other ETL systems.
Creating dynamic mailto: links in Flask
Tue, Nov 30, 21
I’ve spent the last month working on www.rtljobs.com, a niche job aggregator for logic design jobs. Our first scraping pipeline had some warts, so I wanted to be sure that the site had was a way to report bad job links. That way, if a user clicked on a job link that was no longer active, they could alert me that one of the job postings was taken down.