Embedded - 19: Bacon and Beer Event

Episode Date: September 18, 2013

Karen Field (@karenfield) and Elecia talk about 2014 DesignWest, the embedded systems conference, and how to submit your idea for a session. 2014  DesignWest is March 31 - April 3, 2014. Call for abstracts is open, submit your idea! Speaker benefits include speaker room, speaker party, full conference pass, conversation starting badge for networking, plus resume fodder.

You are listening to Making Embedded Systems, the show for people who love gadgets. I'm Alicia White, and I've got Karen Field on the line today to talk about the Embedded Systems Conference and how you can attend for free. Oh, kind of. Hi, Karen. Welcome. Hey, Alicia. Hey, thank you for inviting me to be on the show.

I'm glad you could make it. What's your title? I mean, other than Grand High Queen of the Embedded Systems Conference. Yeah, well, is looking at developing. And what makes it experimental is that I have one foot on the media side. I am the editorial director of EE Times. And the other foot is in the event camp where I am general manager of Design West, which includes the Embedded Systems Conference. And the reason the company is looking at this kind of a role is there is such a natural sort of synergy in the events that we do live and the online communities to which we are speaking to and interacting with all year long.

Sure. The EE Times provides articles about engineering and Embedded Systems Conference or Design West provides sessions about engineering. So I can see how that works. So you said the Embedded Systems Conference is part of Design West. I kind of thought they were the same thing. You've opened up a can of worms here a little bit. So the Embedded Systems Conference celebrated its 25th anniversary this year in 2013.

And as far as I can tell, I think that there has sort of been a controversy around the term embedded almost since day one. And I think particularly as we see embedded almost everywhere today, that the meaning can mean very different things to different people. It can almost be polarizing. And a couple of years ago, so this was 2011, we were beginning to look at where we needed to be in terms of education for engineers. And we went out and interviewed about 80 engineers. And our criteria was engineers who were just beginning their careers. So anybody with about seven or years less experience,

and students to just chat with them, see if they knew about the event, what we might be thinking about doing differently. And it gave us a lot of, I guess, inspiration into the way we think about the program and the directions that we take embedded. And that doesn't mean, though, that we're just ditching everything good about the Embedded Systems Conference. What the new name allows us to do is have an umbrella term under which we can have the Embedded Systems Conference. We introduced Black Hat a couple of years ago. We have Android certification. It allows us to sort of hang on to our roots, but at the same time understand that there are more things that the engineering community is interested in than just what goes on inside the embedded system. Does that make sense?

Kind of. I mean, I don't know that I'll ever give up calling it ESC because Design West doesn't mean much to me. That's, you know, design seems more polarizing than embedded. But is Android embedded is something I have been asked, you know. It's kind of a computer. Where is the line between embedded and not embedded? So, yeah, all right.

When is it this year? In 2014, the show is March 31st through April 3rd, and it is at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, where we've been. We always have a slot in the spring. It moves around from year to year. But so it's a little bit earlier next year than it was this past or this year, but it will be taking place with a lot of familiar things. I think it's funny you said people who have been in their careers less than seven years. I first attended what was then only called Embedded Systems Conference around 1998 when I was at HP switching from pure software to embedded firmware.

And they paid for full conference attendance. And I have to admit, I learned a lot that week. But it's, when I went last year, I kind of didn't really go to the session so much. I mean, I went to a few, but mostly it was to see my friends. How are you making sure that it still covers the basics from year to year? And how are you keeping experience going back that is challenging and i think the challenge part of it is is that embedded is broad that in in fact if you want to talk about people who are new to embedded that might actually mean a really senior engineer who's just learning about fGAs for the first time. So I think as we began to look at the program, we realized there was an opportunity to introduce some very entry-level topics, but that didn't necessarily mean it was just for the beginner engineer. Again, it might be someone who spent their whole career in an adjacent area

but is looking to either gain a new core skill or wants to know something more about the system. I think the fundamentals part worked very well for us. That kind of went hand in hand with something we started a few years ago called, it would be called Embedded Topic, fill in the blank, in 60 minutes. And we do those on the show, and they're very, very condensed talks by some of our traditional speakers who are normally teaching the intermediate to advanced classes that we offer through ESC, but they're taking it down a level to a broader community. Now, within the Embedded Systems Conference itself, and as I said, I think of that for practitioners

who are not coming into that event to look strictly for entry level on the basics, but they may be looking for, I want to take it a bit further. I want to know about the new trends. How do I learn about these things? And I think a big move that I'm making is to bring in more peer-to-peer learning or training or teaching, if you want to call it that. We hear over and over from our community that the most important

way that they learn is from their peers. And while we have just amazing consultants and experts who come in and talk about many of our topics. We are also really working hard to bring in more of the engineers who can speak from a really solid experience about the things that they did and tried and what worked and didn't and tips and tricks for how they can do things better. One of the reasons we're talking now is that you're about to open the call for abstracts so that people can present. Is that right? When does it open? When does it close? Yeah, we are feverishly working to get our call for speaking proposals launched. And at this point, we're ready to go. We're just waiting

for the website to be delivered to us. So the target date is September 11th. And that'll be people can essentially submit their proposals at ubmdesign.com, which is the conference site or the event site. We also use it for the call for abstracts, that will be open for one month. Okay, so the people who should submit include the experts, providing their expertness, either as contractors or book writers, because I know James Grennan and I and boy, every author I know who writes an embedded systems book is usually there to talk about whatever it is they want to talk about. And who else should submit a proposal? So I think anyone who has deep technical and practical hands-on experience with embedded systems hardware, software, firmware, and anyone, practitioner or otherwise, who have developed strategies for reducing time or cost or complexity in the embedded development process.

So it's quite broad. I think the unifying theme really, though, is somewhere in the experience that we're looking for with our teachers and presenters and with the topics that there is an embedded system somewhere in the design. And that's really the perspective that we take at Design West. And we may be talking about some of the new things that we are introducing or have introduced. And again, I always go back to let's presume that the attendee is someone who is interested or currently designing with embedded systems, and whether that is learning how to do the development work on, say, the FPGA better or how to connect it up through the cloud and share data.

It always just comes back to presuming that the embedded system is part of it. And so it sounds like you want evangelists telling people how to use something new or encouraging people to use existing things to talk about how and why and get into the details of here's the actual code and here's what you do next? Well, I think the best speakers, they are evangelists, but I think even maybe more so, or maybe another way to describe it is people who are passionate about what they do, who are interested in sharing what they've learned with a broader community. And I think where the really interesting learning comes in for people is when someone like you,

Elisa, you get up and talk about a project and you talk about not only what technologies you chose and what the functionality of your device is, but you're really talking about the tradeoffs and choices that you had along the way and the consequences of even picking some type of processor. I think that's really what good engineering is about, is sort of making a set of choices and managing the consequences of whatever direction you picked. And I think that's, for as much as I'd love to say, I'd love to get people who have had a successful problem-free project from beginning to end.

I think a lot of the best stories, you're laughing. It doesn't happen. But I think the best learning really comes out of stuff that didn't work so well and how you sort of troubleshooted and engineered your way out of it. Well, then you're also looking for the makers, the people who are doing this in their free time and are justifiably proud of their accomplishments, but definitely don't have a straight road ahead of them. Yeah, well, I think the makers, what's interesting and cool to me is that so many engineers are makers in their spare time if they're not also makers at work, meaning that they're developing a one-off thing in their basement. And I think that a lot of good engineering lessons can come out of that, although certainly designing one of anything is totally different than figuring out how to make it cost effectively at 100,000 pieces of it. But what I found with the maker community is

an incredible openness to the kinds of work that they're doing. And that has been very powerful. I think if you're an engineer working for a major OEM, it can often be more difficult to get up and share what you're doing, particularly if you're going to talk about maybe some of the things that didn't work so well before it launched. Well, and that's one of the things that I saw in last year's submissions was there were a lot of companies who believed that they should have sessions just because they were a company. And I liked the people who there was one guy, I think he was. Well, I'm not sure where he's from, and I probably shouldn't say anyway, but he was from a major company and they definitely had a booth and they were going to be speaking on all sorts of stuff. But he didn't want to talk about what his company was working on. He wanted to talk about his open remote operating vehicle that went underwater.

It was so cool. But in the submission, it was hard to tell. And there were so many submissions that were just advertisements. Yeah. And, you know, we love vendor companies presenting. But if the purpose of the talk is to talk about the products and the components and the tools for developing embedded systems, we do offer an alternative to those speakers, which is our sponsored vendor sessions. And when done right, they can be really fabulous. Oh, sure.

I mean, if I want to learn about Atmel's new processor line, I will go to Atmel and listen to their speech and then they'll give me a dev kit for sitting through it and everybody will be happy. But if I'm paying to go to a conference, I don't want to listen to an advertisement. Yep. Totally. Totally. I'm with you on that one. So it's hard sometimes to get people to submit because it's a fairly big time commitment. You're talking in front of a bunch of people. So the idea is not to screw up, at least not too badly on your presentation. And, uh, and, and we don't always get to talk about what we're working on at work because

our companies either want us to be advertisement marketing bots or they want us never to say anything about even where we work. How are we going to convince the engineers that it's worth it? Well, I guess starting with we need to make it super easy for them and meaning that we're no longer requiring a paper be submitted that it will be a proposal for a speaking slot that will likely include powerpoints but won't have all the rigor around it because honestly I presented myself and I think I would be very hard-pressed to have come up with a paper around the gadget that I presented. I think in terms of what makes it worthwhile for people, we do offer a free pass, all-access pass, to the event.

And as far as what the value of that is, it actually depends on when you register for the conference, but that can be over $1,000. So I think an opportunity to come if there might not be another way and you can submit a proposal, it's cool, you're in. is a an incredible there can be an incredible kind of satisfaction in getting up and teaching your peers and I know that I'm speaking for myself but in getting up and talking about a project I did with lily pad which I think is targeted toward grade schoolers I'm not a programmer so it's probably a good project for me. But no matter what level you are, it was just this immense satisfaction that I had when somebody in the audience came up to me afterward to ask me a question. And I think that engineers by nature, many of us are teachers. We enjoy showing people how to do things, sometimes to an incredible amount of detail. But I think that that for people who,

they may surprise themselves at how rewarding that can be to get up and, you know, get to talk about yourself and what you do. Oh, I totally agree. I mean, well, I have a podcast, so I can talk about what I do. So that's kind of maybe. But yes, the aspect of what I'm showing you is really nice. It's so rewarding. And I was surprised every session that I went to had a lot of people. And by a lot, I mean like 50 to 100, not like 10, which I know there were some sessions that weren't fully super attended, but those were kind of, you know, the early morning ones. And it was great to have people ask questions and provide encouragement. So, you know, engineers who want to teach is great. Engineers who want encouragement, that's something we all are pretty hungry for. Absolutely. And then there's bullet points on your resume.

This is, I mean, even if you're showing off your home project and how much you have just gone down all of the wrong paths, it's nice to have on your resume. It's one little, I'm not just your normal engineer. I'm a speaker. I need the music. You know, thank you. I'm a speaker. Da-da-da-do. I need the music. Hey, you know, thank you for pointing that out. You know, I think one other benefit, whether you're speaking or attending or sort of both, is the networking aspect to it. And you talked about meeting up with friends at the event. But I also think about how important it is for all of us to

be constantly networking. And I was looking at a poll that, I don't know, a Forbes or some business-oriented site had run asking professionals, what is the one thing that you wish you would have done differently in your career? And the number one response was do more networking and I think that it obviously there's some just wonderful ways that you can get feedback or encouragement or ideas but I think it becomes absolutely invaluable if you are at a point where you're on the job market and are looking to connect find out what's available and, um, and, and really position yourself for, for making a change. Well, in the networking aspect, uh, and being a speaker together is pretty cool. I mean, there's the speaker badge, which really helps start conversations

as someone who outlines all conversations in advance. Uh, it's nice to have somebody say, what are you speaking on? And then then suddenly the ice is broken and you can talk back and forth. But so what do you think? What do you think about this? So we're thinking this year or this coming year that we will have our speakers wear T-shirts or some way of flagging what their expertise is. So could you imagine Jack Ansel walking around with a some some, you know, logo on his back that says, ask me about C, I'm an expert, something that just sort of. Are you really serious about this? I'm serious. Please, no.

Please. I have so much trouble figuring out what to wear that's nice looking and professional and is already in my closet usually. All right. Adding a t-shirt to that. You just don't want to wear t-shirts. So maybe a big button or something that, you know, really triggers those hallway, aisleway conversations. You know, some conferences have the ribbons. Have you seen those? Well, I've seen the ribbons that are like generic to speakers, but are you talking about ribbons that would have something else called out on it? Well, yeah, there'd be the speaker ribbon,

there'd be the Android ribbon, there'd be the, I don't know, I'm sure TI would be happy to print up their own ribbons and at Mel can have a little AVR robot ribbon. No, TI would have a button that says keep calm and I'm an Android embedded developer. Well, yeah, and all the little ribbons, you know, if you were a speaker, you'd have the speaker ribbon as well as all, whatever you wanted.

And as an attendee, you'd have other ribbons. I don't know cause I don't really like to wear the ribbons, but I do like to see them cause it's another way to break the ice and say, Oh, you're, you're interested in Android and I'm not. So I'm walking, no, that's not what's supposed to happen. But, oh, you're interested in Android. And I'm not, so I'm walking. No, that's not what's supposed to happen. But you're interested in bare metal C microprocessor development. I can tell that from your three different ribbons. I don't know.

Yeah. Sometimes the badges have tags on them, almost like hashtags. That would be cool. But the embedded systems conference badges have been a little small to read from distance. I don't know. It's an interesting problem. Well, so one more thing you didn't mention about being a benefit of a speaker, and I hope you aren't taking this away from us, the speaker room.

We get that, right? Yes, you do. So I didn't know about the speaker room. We get that, right? Yes, you do. So, so I didn't know about the speaker room. If you, that might've been, you know, what would have pushed me over to speak sooner, but it's a room in the hotel where there are a bunch of chairs. You can sit down and it's got its own wifi and there are snacks, including lunch. And I don't know whether there's dinner or breakfast. I usually manage lunch. And there are always other speakers. And there are some who are clearly working. But at one end of the room or the other, there's always a group of speakers who are just kind of sitting back chatting.

And they don't mind if you sit down and say, hi, what are you speaking about? And I have met the most interesting people just hanging out in the speaker room wow that's great we uh we also do have a speaker party that uh that we do every year and so speakers will get a special invite to that so just in case you didn't see everybody uh during the day in the speaker room you'll have a chance at night at the party to mingle a bit more. Yes, yes. That was that was nice. Everybody kind of cleaned up for that. There were not many t shirts and people brought super gadgets. Last year's, there were many Google glasses and things that weren't quite out on the market yet. Yes, very cool., yeah, I, I think that that's, that's one of the big benefits that will keep me being a speaker. I know it sounds silly, but that's networking with the people I

really don't know yet. And it's networking with people who might be mentors for me. And so I, I really like that. You know, I think no matter how great social media is, I think that it's still an imperfect tool in many cases to try to introduce yourself to somebody who you do not know. And it, you know, I've tried to link in with people that I wanted to interview for an article or ask them if they would consider speaking. And I'm not saying over time that social media might not be an effective way to slowly build up that relationship, but I think that there's almost no substitute for meeting someone in person, exchanging that business card, having a brainstorming session over a beer or something takes you such a long way into really getting to

know people and people that you might want to work with in the future or they might want to work with you. Yeah. So do you pay for travel or speaking fees? I would say as a rule, no, but there are always exceptions to the rule, and we pay for people who may travel a long distance, who are teaching all week long, who are bringing something special at greatest expense into the event. And so I think it's safe to say that everyone gets the free pass to the conference, but we will consider picking up other expenses depending on the case. Cool. Okay. Well, I guess that's all the encouragement that I can provide for people to actually go look at the call for abstracts. I do want a lot of neat submissions because I'll go to the conference and I want to see neat talks. What are your session categories this year?

So our session categories are within ESC, they are many of the familiar session categories. What we are doing is providing a little bit different type of programming, and we're always, of course, looking for new subjects within those topics. But just as a quick read down the list here, I will tell you that we're seeking proposals for debugging and test, embedded Android, embedded systems engineering, hardware, Linux kernel and operating systems, programming. And in programming, we really are looking for talks on almost any language as long as there is an embedded angle to it. Processors and programmable devices, real-time operating systems, safety, security, and hacking, and

software architecture. And if I can't fit whatever talk I've got in my mind into one of those or maybe two of those subjects, it seems silly. It's pretty broad. Now, what we are doing differently this year, and we over the years have tried a variety of different ways to bring in content that was adjacent to what I think of as the core embedded systems conference. And the topics that I just mentioned, I think you're correct. They pretty much cover most, if not all, elements of the system. For this year, we took a look at attendance and classroom sizes, what were the most popular topics, and are going to be creating special programs that are more

curated than putting that topic into the Embedded Systems Conference. And one of the big areas is the Internet of Things. I'm not even sure that that's what the name of it will be, but the idea is that the embedded system, it is now part of a larger system of connected devices that connect up through the cloud and share data. And that is a topic that, as we all know, is an emerging topic. My feeling was if we put that into the Embedded Systems Conference, it's really a special subset, although I suppose you could argue that we're getting close to a point that won't be connected up through the cloud.

But we will be offering, in conjunction with the Embedded Systems Conference, a one-day summit that basically walks the attendees all the way through all of the issues as they relate to, I want an embedded device that's connected. And that allows us to go deeper into the areas that are very specific about networking and database management and how do you deal with the kind of resource constraints, things that are, again, important and interesting to embedded designers, but is targeted at somebody who's looking to do that type of a particular application. So I think of the topics that I outlined in the Embedded Systems Conference, those are general buckets and categories that there's constant waves of change in the things that

we talk about, but it's not intent. It's more, I view it as a sampling for people. If you look at how people navigate the Embedded Systems Conference, they are picking and choosing from a variety of different things. And so our intent here was to give people, in some cases, a more curated program. Okay. And certainly, connectivity and the Internet of Things has been on my show a few times. I mean, we did electric imp with Matt and that I'm sure that you'll get some submissions on that because it's not only a maker thing. It's they're pretty evangelistic of themselves. And, and I had Andreas on from Atmel and he mentioned that Atmel purchased-Fi chip company recently and hinted that something more interesting may be coming soon.

Although Internet of Things, once again, I'm going to say I hate that phrase. It's so overused. Well, in fact, we are currently right now sort of crowdsourcing. What should we call it for an engineering audience? I suppose more importantly than just figuring out what's the right name is making sure that we architect the curriculum for it to make it meaningful and with practical takeaways for anyone who is looking to launch a project like that. Well, yeah, but which name is winning yet? I really like connected embedded devices.

Yeah, Andrea said connectivity and just left it at that, but connected embedded devices, I could see that. It sort of sneaks the word embedded into the... CED is not the best acronym. No, no. There could be worse, but I'm with you. Yes, there could be a lot worse. So you mentioned you had a lily pad session one time.

What did you talk about? So my talk was only five minutes long, but it's one of my favorite parts of the conference, which is a workshop that, not workshop, I guess it's more of a session that we do in the Expo Theater where engineers get up and talk about their gadgets. And they have five minutes to go through 20 slides that fully describe the project and bring a working demo along. So I created a hat with LEDs sewn into it.

I think my aspirations for it were higher than the actual product, but I have to tell you a funny story about that. As I was looking at what project to do, I thought, well, if I do this sewing project, I'll have the sewing nailed. I haven't programmed on it. I haven't worked with Arduino. And I couldn't even thread a needle. It was just poking my finger. And I think that's, I guess, that in some ways, all the credit then to Atmel for really developing a kit for which the programming part of it was the simplest of anything. That's funny, yes. I'm not very good at sewing, so I understand where you're going there.

I don't think I ever got the Girl Scout badge and so on. So do you have any fantasy speaker topics? I mean, do you have, if only someone would talk just so cool to have come and speak, some no longer living, actually. But I think as I think about the perfect world for 2014, I would love to have a company like Medtronic talk about how they fixed their insulin pump after the hacking incident. And I think that that would fully close the loop in the sense of a hacker identifying and exposing a weakness. But I think the learning that could happen in having the engineers get up and talked about, well, how they dealt with that and what happened with the redesign of that product, how difficult was it, how long did it take to get FDA approval again, what might they have done differently, would be really fascinating. That would be fascinating. So if someone at Medtronic is listening, what is the process?

They go to UBM, they see the call for speakers? Yes. And what we are asking for two different types of sessions this year. One is a proposing a talk that would fit into one of the categories that I listed, the 10 different categories. And things that are going to get our attention there are really things that are novel, but also expose a technical depth to it. And I'd really say for anybody, it's no different than what we all do, I think, as part of our jobs is to sell it. So our track chairs are really looking for talks that propose something original, something useful, something compelling, and have them meet to back it up. I suppose the worst thing is something with a great title and a horrible talk behind it. The other type of talk that we are programming into ESC is classic post-mortems.

And classic post-mortems are really case studies that are presented by the people who designed a noteworthy product or were involved in something potentially like the Medtronic situation, that they're talking about a situation and taking the audience through the development, through a specific aspect of it, something that really is lifting up the hood to really see underneath how that went together. And I think that we always, all of us as speakers, struggle between being too broad or too narrow. And I think that our audience can handle a great deal of technical depth. And as a case in point, Herb Hare, the MIT professor who presented about the prosthetic legs,

he got feedback that people absolutely loved, that he got into a technical depth that he presumed, okay, these people in the audience, they all understand first principles and physics and basic engineering of a very broad sort. And that is, you know, we are really looking for speakers who can get up and talk to a group of really smart engineers and even teach them something. That makes sense.

And the idea that we need to remember that a title matters when you make a submission and that punchiness is key because the track chairs are not necessarily all full-time UBM employees. after Thanksgiving dinner or on New Year's Day or whatever constitutes our free time, I think it's important for the submissions to realize that there are some things that really matter and being able to write something good is important because it does reflect what we think is probably going to be your speaking ability. If you can't make your submission interesting, then I'm not going to believe you're going to be your speaking ability. If you can't make your submission interesting, then I'm not going to believe you're going to make your presentation interesting. And I think that it is as much explaining not just what, but why.

So why am I talking about this? And why should engineers actually care about this topic? And if you're a marketing person, it needs to be something other than selling your product. If you're just going to talk about how great your product is the whole time, well, use the expo floor for that. Yeah. If you are with a vendor company, and we do have some excellent speakers who are with vendor companies, you have even more, I think, more of a hurdle to prove yourself that what you're presenting is unbiased and useful to the community. And like I said, we certainly do see talks like that.

I would just encourage anybody, if you are thinking about submitting something and want to kind of shortcut the process, reach out to me, give me a call and we can talk about it and see if we can position what you'd like to talk about in a way that would fulfill what our audience's expectation is going to be around this event. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. And it's interesting to hear that you want failure analysis. I think that's one of the hardest things to talk about because you have to admit you failed. It's a little easier to say this processor didn't work for me because that's the processor's fault, of course. But I failed to take into account something that may actually endanger someone's life.

Oh, man, do I never want to say those words out loud to an audience of 100 people? You know, I think what's so compelling about being able to talk about it is that when you're successful, I don't think that you step back and actually analyze it or question it much. I mean, in fact, you may even luck out, right, the one-hit wonder sort of thing, but I think it is through things that didn't work the way you intended that you have to go back and reflect upon it and probably in some way really are gaining a deeper understanding of how the system works and what its operating principles are. And I think, again, I sure can understand why no one would get up and confess a failure in a way that would put you at risk in some way or your company or your products. But to the extent that people can share both big and small things, I think that there's also a kind of an aspect to it that resonates with the subculture.

Like everybody, it happens to everybody. You know, if you're designing something, really didn't mean it to do telling other people how you could have avoided it how you could have avoided the regret how you could have fixed it if sooner or identified the problem sooner well now you're fixing a whole bunch of other problems that may be just as serious so that the teaching aspect, it's intimidating to say, I failed to look ahead and identify this problem. Now you get the actual good part, which is, and I can help you not redo my failure. So it's worth it um you know we had a engineer bob badly who's going to be back again this year working with us on a boot camp for hardware startups and he gave a talk on why i failed

at kickstarter and my friends like that and i and i think you know the room was just jam-packed and i think it's because he peeled away the veneer of that everybody's going to come up with a pebble watch and things will go swimmingly to really talk about here's what I expected out of the process and here's what really happened. And I think that as much as anything, I don't think it was a particularly technical talk in the sense of that. I mean, nothing wrong with the product that he was positioning, but I think he helped set expectations in the audience for anybody who might be thinking that's a path that I'm going to take to get funding for my company. Yeah. Yeah. Cause we can, that's a peer to peer that we can be useful to each other, learn from my mistakes, as opposed to the, here's how you really use C, not what you were taught in college sort of talks, which are useful too, but that's, that's the first seven years of your career sort of talk. Yep. Those are the fundamentals.

If somebody wants to get involved, but doesn't want to do, want to be a speaker, are there options for them? We actually had a lot of people who that was their situation this year. And we are always thrilled to have people helping in a volunteer capacity. This year, Gerd Van Loo, one of the developers of the Raspberry Pi, he was doing his hands-on training and he needed a couple of people with him to just assist in, he was queuing the equipment when it came in the night before, and then a couple of people on hands to help him with the actual workshop. And, you know, that's a really great way to be involved. If there's a situation where it's, I want to be involved, but I don't really want to give a talk, like what you're,

the kinds of things that you have available. We do other kinds of things like theater events, where we have panel discussions. We're always looking for great people who, you know, like to talk and have an opinion about things. And, again, just in any kind of capacity in helping to represent UBM and kind of making a good attendee experience, we frankly would welcome the help. And anyone who might be thinking along those lines, I'd love to hear from them. Cool. And so, you know, if any of you out there are thinking about, maybe I have this idea, do try. Do try. And, you know, Karen and I will be on Twitter, and you can talk to us if you want to just float a couple of characters by.

We are also doing something this year a little bit different on the expo floor. I described that gadget clinic where we got up on stage and presented our gadgets. a clever working product, whether it's a robot or a blinking hat, who wants to participate in an area that we're going to have on the show floor that is going to be a walk-through area where basically attendees can visit with the inventors, find out more about how the stuff works, see it demoed, and we're just making it really easy, meaning we'll give you space to come in and you just need to come for a day or part of a day. It doesn't have to be, you know, standing there for three days straight. So love to hear from people, love seeing all the cool things. We had a robotic bartending machine this year. That kind of stuff is just so fun to see an embedded system in action. And if it's

in the context of something fun or entertaining, it's really memorable. Of course, of course. That's like a mini Maker Faire slash science project slash embedded systems conference. That does sound like fun. One more question, and then I think we'll both get back to work. What are you especially looking forward to this year for 2014? You know, really, I'm looking forward to the bacon and beer. It took forever for the bacon to get finished cooking. We had, well, in fact, yeah, that will be making a return visit for 2014. But honestly, I'm just, I'm really excited about a lot of the cool new things that we're doing. And having many more engineers be involved this year, I think is really, really going to be cool.

So thank you for having me on the show. Well, thank you for speaking with me about Design West. And that's in March 31st through April 3rd in 2014. But the call for abstracts is opening really soon, possibly before this podcast is posted. It is one of my favorite conferences. And it's a place where I meet people that I only see once or twice a year, and I'm hoping to meet even more people. I have had fun hearing about it from your perspective. It is a little different as a conference organizer versus attendee, even speaker. Yep. Great.

Well, thank you. That's the show for this week. My co-host is Karen Field from UBM. Join me in extending a big thank you to my producer, Christopher White, and please send your comments and questions to show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link at embedded.fm. We do like to hear from you, even the strange ones.