Embedded - 504: The Robot Was Expecting It

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

It’s another episode with Elecia and Chris. This week they discuss people that have influenced their lives and careers, thinking about past career choices and regrets therein, identities, the Embedded Slack book club, and electronic projects. Chris is currently taking Dogbotic’s DIY Rhythm Widgets course which covers making an analog drum machine from components. We had Dogbotic founder Kirk Pearson on the show on Episode 491. Elecia mentioned the book that the Embedded Slack #book-club channel is working through, Data Driven Science & Engineering Machine Learning, Dynamical Systems, and Control, which you can find for free at https://databookuw.com along with code and examples. The group is two sessions in but if you want to join late, join the Slack group via Patreon or Ko-Fi. You can subscribe to the newsletter here. Transcript

Hello and welcome to Embedded. I am Elisia White here with Christopher White. It's just going to be us talking to each other. You know how these go. They haven't even heard how it already has gone. Yes. Nothing like take two on the intro. How are you doing? I am doing adequately.

All right. I told somebody to poke a robot with a stick this morning, so I'm doing a little bit better than average. Was the robot expecting it? I believe the robot should always be expecting it. Is this a kind of a mechanical poking with a stick or a attempt to anger the robot? Why not both? Por que no los diez? Dos. Dos.

Why not God? Why not God? Why not God? Right. One of those mornings. I hope you are having a better day. This is the mistake we're actually recording in the morning, which is against our general principles. So, both of us are punchier than usual. So last time it was just us, William had a question and we didn't answer it. And I haven't thought about it at all since then, even though I promised to. Well, now's your chance. William says, it would be interesting to somehow do a show on or talk about who key people in your life were from school to college to work.

Key people that may only have done or said a small thing that made a big impact on your life. All right. Have you already thought about this and have answers? I actually didn't think about it either, but I do have an answer. I have actually a really good answer. I have a few answers that come to the top of my head that probably with greater thought I would come up with more people. So, yes, I have some answers, but you can go ahead because you're more prepared than me. So I went to the Grace Hopper Conference, which is a conference for women in software. It's a pretty big deal. I presented, I also took almost all of the women who were in my company,

which was ShotSpotter at the time. And I ended up sitting at a table one night without all of them, but with a bunch of senior women. And I had been a bunch of senior women. And I was, I had been a director at that point, I was definitely, should be at the seniors table. And I was talking to a professor, and you know, I can make my career sound relatively amusing.

And I said what I had done about inertial measurement units and gunshot location systems and applications and thinking about software. And the professor, who was a professor from Australia whose name I do not recall, said, if only you wrote a book about it, you'd have a PhD. And it was years later that I wrote my book, but that was always a kernel. And it was a total throwaway comment from her. But it did have an effect on shaping my, I could write a PhD about my experiences. I mean, not a memoir, but, and that's how we ended up with Making Embedded Systems, the book.

Oh, okay. I think I remember that story, but I haven't heard it in a while. Kind of forgotten about it. I actually talked to her years later. Again, I don't remember her name. It's going to come to me like 3 a.m. And she was like, I don't even remember that. Well, most people don't remember offhand comments. It was just a random dinner. Or jokes that they made.

Yeah, that's true. Most people don't understand the impact they have on other people sometimes. We tend to take things in that other people aren't intending to be profound or life-changing. But sometimes it's, you know, it's not even necessarily something they said, it may be just shifting your perspective that you had in your own mind in a way that, you know, takes a little bit of leverage to move you to a different place. Yeah.

And I wasn't ready to be moved right then, but it provided enough leverage that when the opportunity came, I was like, yeah, okay, I could, yeah. Have you thought of anything like that? I mean, that was kind of special for me. Not like that. Yeah, not like that. I'd have to think long and hard about stuff like that. Yeah, no, I was just thinking of more traditional people who through their own,

well two classes of people, people who through their own kind of interest and enthusiasm about something had it kind of pushed me to also become enthusiastic about it. And then just mentor type people. So one person that comes to mind was I had the great privilege of going to a very small private school for high school, which was good in some ways. It was very diverse, which was weird for private school. So that was really good for me. But once you got to like senior advanced classes and things,

there weren't that many students taking them. So calculus, I got to take calculus as a senior, I think. Yeah. And my class was only like four or five people. And they had an instructor, his name was Sid Raffer, who was this guy. He was from New York and he smoked chain smoker. He always wore these black suits and he was a really interesting guy to talk to. He had very strong opinions about things and was very clearly into what he was teaching. He was excited about calculus and teaching it to students. It was different from the other teachers I had had in a lot of ways who were just doing the teaching.

They were good teachers, but they were not engaging in the same way. And I remember him as we took, there was the AP class and I remember finishing the AP class or the AP test. I remember finishing the AP test and we all took it at that, it was at our school. We all came out of the exam room and he was standing there waiting for us and really anxious to hear how had we done. And I remember telling him, well, I was nauseated the whole morning, so I have no idea.

I woke up feeling really sick, which, you know, now that I think about it is, you know. Anxiety started long before you recognized it. And he didn't really appreciate that response from me, but I think we all did very well. But I just, I remember seeing him being kind of anxiously waiting for his four students or how many, four or five of us to come out and hear how had we done immediately. Like he was waiting outside the door. And yet it was at your school. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, there was a lot of- So the cost to him was minor. Yeah. I don't know if it was a weekend or not, but yeah, it was not a big deal for him to be there. And yet it really has had an impact on you. Just showing that level of enthusiasm and care.

And I think that was my kind of first experience of what college courses were like. Many of the college courses we took were like, small for us. You were also privileged to go to a small school just later. College was small. High school was very large. Small intimate courses where sometimes the professors were just incredibly ebullient. Is that the word I'm thinking of? You know, excited about the thing they were teaching,

even though they've been doing it for 30 years, some of them. And they were excited about the topic or about the teaching or about both. About the students and yeah. And that could make a huge, I mean, we went to a teaching college. Yeah. As opposed to a research university. I think partly that experience at the end of high school hurt me for college because the first year was not like that. And it got to be that way once you got out of freshman year and sophomore things started to shrink down. You went to your major classes shrank professors who were more interested in teaching, you know, 100 and above level material instead of CS1.

But yeah, so I kind of came out of that jazzed about learning and then kind of crashed a little bit. But I still remember that experience. And other people, you know, my first job, I had some good mentors, some people who really, now when I think about it, like, why did they go to bat for me? I was a terrible, terrible coder

who didn't know what I was doing. Kept making mistakes. Yeah, but they acknowledged that and they saw that there was potential and they were willing to put up with it, which a lot of people, I think these days, are maybe not able to do so easily. I don't know. There's some fun in teaching people. There is, but it takes the certain people.

And there were definitely people who weren't interested in that who have come across in my career. And those people, some of them continued to act in a mentor capacity for a long time. Including encouraging you to write papers, go to conferences. But I would have a better answer if we were able to think about it longer. You had like four weeks.

Yeah, think about it longer, meaning if I had remembered to think about it longer. You had like four weeks. Yeah, think about it longer, meaning if I had remembered to think about it. William went on to say that there were many, many teachers that helped him, one being a physics high school teacher who showed that science was interesting and fun and that William could understand it. And then William shared a personal story which he didn't mark private, so woo-hoo. I think the person that made the biggest impact on me was a guy I met on a ferry while backpacking through Europe after I graduated and had been working for a while. I was super down in the dumps, feeling I was useless and wasn't good enough at my current job and everything was getting me down. I felt like just quitting everything. In a short hour on that ferry ride, he managed to motivate me to get my

self-confidence back, that I was able to go on and apply for jobs around the world I never thought possible. I never got his name and I never saw him again. To him, I really want to say thank you. His comment about physics and, what did you say, physics or something? High school physics teacher. It reminded me that this teacher is a calculus teacher. Also, my extreme privilege, there was nobody who wanted to take computer science in my school except me.

I think maybe one other person, yeah. And he teamed up with another teacher there who taught physics and they both taught me CS. I took a CS course and I was the only person, which basically meant I was just messing around with Pascal, you know, and doing assignments that they gave me. Yeah, and then they were willing to do that, you know. I mean, I'm sure they got paid or whatever, but it was not, I don't think I had a class period like I had to do it after school because nobody's

going to. Did you get snuckered into making a CS club and you didn't even know? No, because I got credit. It was a real class. But I mean, just again, they were willing to go out of their way because somebody was excited about something. Unfortunately, it's led to me being surrounded by computers. So thanks a lot, Mr. Raffer.

I had a high school teacher. I guess I had a lot of good high school teachers. But I did speech and debate. And De Graaff was always very hands-off. You can do whatever you want, very hippie-ish. I think he taught history as well, but I never took that from him. And it was a little weird having a teacher who had high expectations that when you met them you could tell, but didn't push you, didn't mark you down for slacking. It was like you were rewarded for succeeding, but not punished for slacking.

And it was a different model than many of the other high school classes I took, where for the most part you were in trouble unless you did something right. It was a different model and I liked it. And I mean, speech and debate isn't... It was an elective that trashed my whole AP schedule for which totes were fake. Oh no. Yes. I was so in that little track. And then when I finally got out of it, it was pretty cool.

I had a bio teacher who gave us science papers to read. Mm-hmm. That's cool. And it might have been that I was the only one doing it, but I loved it. It was about gene editing. I mean, I still remember parts of that paper. It was so hard, but I mean, she was pretty much like, okay, we'll talk about it and go through it and that was APBio, so that was pretty cool.

That was a small class. I mentioned bio, and I remember my bio teacher who was weird, weird. I had some weird teachers too. I won't mention their names, but there were some weird times. It was the 80s, folks. Yeah. Things were a little different. Looking back and thinking of my high school teachers more as people, I mean some of them There were some weird times. It was the 80s, folks. Yeah. Things were a little different.

Thinking of my high school teachers more as people. I mean, some of them I actually got to know as people, mostly my English teachers. So, you had more role models in your work starting up, and even in your role models tended to continue through them. Yeah. I had a few people, but I haven't had as much long-term. I mean, I say long-term, but yeah, I mean, the hands-on kind of mentoring was only a few years, and then there were, I think they would consider themselves

peers later on who were like, do you want to work on something together, that kind of thing. But yeah, you had, I mean, you had similar. I guess so. But I never, there was never somebody I would have said, okay, this person is my mentor. We didn't use that word back then, really.

We did. Did we? Yes. All right. I went to several like, find a mentor sessions and several chats and coffees with people. At the early stage of your career? From the beginning through ShotSpotter, so yeah.

Yeah, I mean, none of them were formal. They were people I worked for or with or on my team or were senior people. You know, it's the senior engineers turning junior engineers into future senior engineers kind of thing, people who actually took an interest in that. And I had a manager who was really good, but we became friends and then we tried to do the manager relationship again. It did not work for friendship either. Anyway, I think this was an interesting question, not only because we got to talk about people who matter to us and how little and a thing you can do can have a huge impact on someone else. How showing your enthusiasm for things can have a huge impact on people.

So... And next time we can talk about anti-role models, because I've got some of those. People who were in mentor positions who screwed it up. No, I'm not going to talk about that, but there were a few people like that. Oh yeah, definitely. Oh yeah. Let's name names. Let's not. I mean, okay, so that's actually interesting. What are some of the things that people who should be role models do that make you feel worse? Um, I think it's very difficult to motivate people without knowing them very well. Certain people. Maybe, you know, some people are easy to motivate, but some people are difficult to motivate.

Can't you just throw pizza at everybody? And when your advisee or mentee or whatever is struggling and you are not experienced in helping them resolve those struggles, that could be a real problem. And so I had trouble with my master's research advisor, who did not motivate me and help me properly. And so I basically crashed out of research. Yeah, so that's one example. And there's others like that where by trying to be encouraging, it was backfired. It's funny. I think it's easier to be this butterfly that wanders in, gives some encouragement and wanders

off. When you have a more formal mentoring or managing role, that's where you really get to screw people up. Yes, well, it's your, you know, you occupy a place of authority, you occupy a place of this person has succeeded and they know what they're doing. Therefore, what they say has import. And, you know, as a junior person or an advisee, what they say carries a lot of weight. you know, as a junior person or an advisee,

what they say carries a lot of weight. And it can be, like you said, a small comment that doesn't encourage you to write a textbook, it encourages you to say, well, screw this. Yeah, so. And as you get to know people more, it's easier to see their dissatisfactions, which you can easily acquire for yourself. And maybe, you know, it's a lot that comes from me too.

You know me as a person who easily gets frustrated, it has a streak of being unsatisfied if I'm not accomplishing something, to which am I satisfaction. And, you know, there was a period in grad school where there was this dichotomy. I was excelling at the classwork and research, I was not making any progress at all and didn't make any sense. And stuff was being thrown at me that was far in advance of where my classwork was, and I was expected to meet that, but I didn't have the... Tools? The tools, the explanation, the acknowledgement, yeah, this is really hard and here's how we get there. I'm giving you something beyond your classwork.

There wasn't the kind of the pathway to get to where I could get solutions to problems. And it was original research too. So it was like, maybe there isn't an answer, right? And that's always so getting some counseling from that side of things. Like, yeah, this is, this is new. Let's see where this goes instead of. Nope. That's the wrong answer.

Nope. I don't see that this doesn't make sense. Nope. You know, you're doing it wrong. Uh, oh, you got that. Well, don't rest on, don't rest on your laurels that you got something right. Keep pushing harder. It just didn't jive. And that's, you know, those kinds of relationships are one-on-one

and oftentimes they don't work for no fault of either side. Yeah. I mean, is there something you could have told past Christopher that would have helped him get through it? Don't do research. Not research is hard. No, I don't think I'm temperamentally cut out to sit at the kitchen table for hours at a time with textbooks, MATLAB, and a notebook by myself and figure stuff out. So changing topics. You've been unhappy with engineering and you and I have been talking off and on and I did not prepare you for this topic. Cool.

It's not like you read the last one, which was totally in the show notes. We've talked before about roles in our personal lives. Like I always ask artists, when did you first start calling yourself an artist? When did you take that title? And I introduced myself as an engineer. I mean, embedded software engineer, sure, but it's engineer is part of my identity in a way that started very early. And it's not as much a part of your identity, although it is part, definitely.

I was asked the question recently, if you took that identity away, if you took that word away and not replaced it with developer or programmer or whatever word might work there, but took that semantic identity away. What other identities do you have? And for this, it was a professional sort of question. But do you have other words that you respond to? I was surprised at how much, if you took engineer away, it would affect me. I don't, I actually don't really claim author.

I don't claim artist for sure. I don't think I ever will. Maker is something I like, but it's not something I am. Why don't you just be a person? Why do you have to have a label? The identities help. Okay. I don't think that way.

I may have used to, I think I used to and got excited about that, but I don't really think that way anymore at all. Like, if you took engineer away from me, I'm like, oh, okay, I forced me to answer that question, I would prefer to be an artist, musician, artist in some fashion. I think I've met the minimum requirements to claim that mantle, having recorded several records and played gigs for not an insignificant number of people. I'm probably, you know, the bottom rung of being able to claim that mantle, but that would be what I would prefer to anything else. But other than that, yeah, I just, you know, I think as I get older, that stuff is not as important to me.

And I'm more interested in, I'm in a transitional period where I'm trying to figure out what I'm more interested in in terms of identity, which again, I'm not super thrilled with, you know, declaring myself an X, Y, or Z. I think at this stage of my life, I would like to be considered not harmful. All right. I will give my answer and then we'll go to the next question since you just led into it. Researcher.

That's a good one. Where you said you didn't want to sit at the table with books. Well, that's a different kind of research. That was, you know. Oh, no. That kind of research I'm in for. I might be in for it now. I don't know. I haven't tried again. And I don't think it would be as lonely as you think it would be. But that's because I see the communities that I kind of am on the outskirts of that I think would be fun. Those communities didn't exist. Like, there was nowhere for me to reach out to.

It was 2004. 2004. And so maybe there was the like a physics forum I should have been on, but that was pretty much it. There was no Slack or Discord or, you know, I think Usenet still existed at that point. But yeah, it would be a different experience and there would be other people to reach out to. And perhaps, you know, a different situation would have had other collaborators. But anyway. Yeah, your research advisor should have been partially a collaborator.

And if he'd had other students, maybe... He was inexperienced. It was not entirely his fault. Yeah. But, I mean, yeah, it's not a research school. So the right path was what I eventually ended up doing, which was like, do the oral exam at the end of the degree and don't do research. And how big are chickens? Ten kilograms.

We have been talking about... No, let me go back. Let me sum up. It is too much. It is too much. Do you regret any of your jobs? Yes. Let me sum up, it is too much. It's too much. Do you regret any of your jobs? Yes.

And if so, does the learning, does the information, the whatever you did and got out of it make it worth it if the application wasn't worth it alone? Yeah. So my first real embedded job was at the Termitology Laser Company, which was a weird company, weird product, weird people. But I learned a lot. I learned I was not really cut out for management. I learned a lot about embedded development by being thrown headfirst into here's a device, not a computer. I mean, I did routers before that, but routers were basically computers with no monitors, right? They were running bespoke operating systems on slightly different kind of CPUs back then,

but it wasn't like embedded as most people would consider it. So yeah, the laser was very embedded. There were safety control systems. I did FDA. I learned a ton, but the application was, the laser was very embedded. There were safety control systems. I did FDA. I learned a ton. But the application was, the company was... You should see his face. They're like, his eyebrows are going back and forth and up and down.

Extremely weird. I worked with some very nice people there, very smart people. And at least one weirdo? Two weirdos. There were at least a half a dozen weirdos and many of them acknowledged it was a weird, you know, many of the non-weirdos who I worked with and enjoyed working with acknowledged it was a strange place and things were weird. But yeah, it was a good experience. That was the job I took going, you know, tying things back once I realized I was losing my mind trying to

do research and so I said I'm going back to work I can't do this I've spent a summer trying to solve fluid flow equations by myself and I can't do it and so I went and got a contracting job there and then they hired me full-time as a manager I did enjoy it for a while, but in hindsight, like weird company, weird product, very weird product space. I don't think we harmed anybody, but I don't know that we really helped anybody. Do you remember that little Italian restaurant

that was impossible to find? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. No, there were good things about it, but, you know, and it's a very long-term retrospective thing. Like, if you asked me, like, right afterwards, I was like, yeah, that was kind of strange, but I got some stuff out of it.

Now I'm like, maybe I should have looked around a little bit more since I was open to work at that point. I mean, you were pulled in by people you knew. Yes, which commonly happens to me and I need to stop doing that. There's that one. There's a short thing I won't discuss. There's a lot, there's a few short things I won't discuss. There's a lot of, there's a few short things I won't discuss. There's definitely contracts I wish I hadn't taken,

but I won't talk about those. Contracts are hard because you never are sure that you're going to have the next one come through anytime soon and you don't want to be out for too long. I do wonder from a purely selfish standpoint whether I should have left Cisco to go to the startup, the first job change I made. I learned a lot there. A lot, but fast.

Everything crashed out with the dot-com boom and I went back to grad school and I was really burned out. I wonder, had I stayed at Cisco as a borer, would I have been more happy? I don't know. Um, but yeah, the medical laser one's the only one I can really say was. Uh, yeah, that's great. And there was another medical one later that was more stressful, but, uh, I felt

like the application was at least at the time was super important. They, since they just finally went out of business. I left there to become a contractor in 2009, so that's how long they kind of sailed along, but they went out of business, so. But that one, you had stories of people. Yeah, it sounded like we were helping people. I don't...

The trouble with stuff like that is it's science, right? And you've got the company doing the research, trying to prove that it's stuff works. And it's difficult to get long-term kind of comparison things. So yeah, we had evidence that it was helping people, but I always question like, we had evidence that was helping people, but I always question like, okay, if it's helping people that much, why is it not being used? Why is this not

being bought? Everybody's going back to their old techniques to do similar stuff. So I think on balance, it could have been helpful had it gotten to where they really wanted it to go, but there was not solid evidence they could get there. So the application they ended up with was a different application. It may have helped people on balance, but it was probably one of those marginal things where it's like, maybe it's better than current care standards, maybe not, but it's's gonna take a lot of time to figure that out. So, and those are fine things to work on because you have to figure those questions out,

but those kind of companies are at the border between research and product. And it can be difficult to tell until very much later whether the thing you made was actually doing what it said it was going to do. Did the learning make it worth it? That place? That one was mostly output for you.

You were providing all the information. You were not acquiring a lot that I remember. Well, there was a lot of physics involved in that place. I did have to read some papers, which was good for having my degree for. There was a lot of corporate, not corporate, management intrigue and drama and schedule stuff. I met some very good people and unfortunately brought some very good people in to suffer along with me. Yeah, I think that place would have been fine with different management, but as it was, it was very sort of a confluence of Silicon Valley and medical, and both of those worlds coming together was a kind of a maelstrom of chaos and frustration.

You didn't answer the question. No. You have to ask it back if you want me to answer. Were there any, what was the question? Jobs you regret? Yeah. I mean, for the most part, I did the best with what I knew. That's it, right?

And hindsight is real. So, okay, so leapfrog, on one hand, I made toys that are plastic that went into landfills. Yeah. On the other hand, I taught kids to read. And it wasn't like I theoretically taught kids to read. I remember that karaoke toy that was awful. I hated it. And yet, the boy in the kindergarten took it home and he was so far behind.

And then he wasn't. And he could sing and identify all of his alphabet. And he used the same stupid tune. I hate that karaoke. So, how many things go into landfills and I can't make that decision? But it was worth it to me and it was worth it to learn how to make things like that. A lot of things go to landfills. I don't think that's a dispositive.

A shot spotter has been something that's been difficult because they've been in the news and the police and the profiling and yet I know that we saved lives. Did we save lives more than we could have? Using different funds, putting that funds in different locations? That I don't know. But I know the people didn't bleed out because the police were called in time. I don't know. And I know that the police officers

I personally worked with cared a lot about the whole community. What years were that? 2004 around that. Yeah. So, I mean, I think you, I think, What year was that? 2004, around that. So, I mean, I think you, I think what people probably don't realize is that things change. I saw a lot of shots bought or you saw a lot of shots bought or I would say you worked there. I feel like a lot of the stuff that came out later happened later. Yeah, when we got a what happened in this situation, we didn't know who was who.

The question was in which location shot first. The militarization of the police, I mean the police have always been police, but the militarization of the police, a lot of the corruption of the police has only increased since 2004, 2005, 2006, whatever, toward the end of the Iraq war and stuff when material was brought back and sold to police departments and that kind of thing. And a lot of stuff changed. And so I can totally see Shotspotter being captured

by a different kind of policing, different ethos, especially desperate for money. So it would not surprise me if you didn't see any of that because it wasn't happening at that time. To be fair, I saw some of it. But I thought the good we were doing outweighed the smaller portion of that. And unfortunately, and don't take this the wrong way, but that is not a thing for engineers to decide.

It's hard for us to understand sociology and politics as engineers. And some of those things require study. And from within the company, we can't necessarily see what's actually happening in the city. True. True. I mean, could shots, water, money have been more effectively used at preventative programs and community interfacing? I can't even begin. And the flip side is also true. Since it's hard for us to do that, it's hard to expect us to always make the perfect job decision, right? We can't go into a company and say, okay, I need you to do your due diligence here and tell me everything about your product and its impact upon society for the next 25 years,

and whether or not you're going to pivot a little bit or lean your finger on the scale and money is tight. We can't do that. So we have to do the best we can do. And I think it's good that we talk about these things now more than people perhaps used to. But I think it's unfair to expect every engineer. I mean, there's obviously companies where it's clear what's going on. During the ShotSpotter times, I did some volunteer work at a girl's high school and I got one of the person a carpool to ShotSpotter with, I got her involved. Or I don't quite remember how it all happened, but she ended up doing a presentation at this girls' high school about Schatzbatter. And it was very casual.

And at the end, the teacher asked what the girls had learned. And one of the girls raised her hand and said, I learned what the word homicide meant. Great. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Shots Potter always had the side eye of there's microphones listening. And I know you guys worked hard to not make that a thing. I have listened to those microphones. They don't catch Jack.

They didn't catch Jack in 2004. And all it takes is someone deciding, how hard is it to shift this? Yes. And that's the thing that I've come, it's the second order of things. Like, okay, I'm making this and right now it's this, but what could this become with not a lot of effort from somebody who wants it to do something I don't want it to do?

And that's the trick I'm trying to learn with taking on clients lately is, this application is this, and how many steps removed is it from something I don't want to be associated with. But you can dig yourself into it. Absolutely. I don't want to do anything. Absolutely. Yeah. So. But applications matter and they both matter for exciting reasons and for don't want to be associated with reasons. Yeah, yeah. Oh, applications matter. Ethics matters. You feel better about yourself if you can

maintain your values. And the second part of the question, did the learning make it worth it? Oh my God, I learned so much at Shotspotter. And I got to apply so many cool things. Oh, Shotspotter was after Crossbow, right? Yeah, Crossbow was IMU. That was your first sort of real embedded job? No. No, all right, Agilent. You've done a lot of embedded before me. Yeah, I went to embedded like...

Pretty quickly. Pretty quickly. Okay. I mean, even the servers, I got down into the microcontroller levels. Right, okay. All right. So, yeah. But I think, okay, so somebody a few years ago, I was doing, I was showing off origami, and not as good as I am now, and even now this comment can apply, but they said something about wasting paper.

Uh-huh. It's like, yes, yes, I am wasting paper learning to do something. That in the end is probably a waste of paper. Where did you draw the line with that? Are you wasting canvas when you're learning to paint? Are you wasting paper when you learn to draw? Am I wasting … Are you wasting breath by breathing? Look at all this wood on the floor I've got here, all these broken sticks. I'm wasting wood, plant, I mean,

look, at a certain point, you know, you've gotta make peace with your selfish, what was the line? Selfish hippie clients. Oh yeah, selfish hippie clients. Oh yeah, selfish hippie clients. Ten points if you get that quote. Yeah, exactly. And I think we have to give ourselves the same grace with work.

Oh yeah, that's what I was saying, is we can't be expected to find the answer for hypotheticals, but we should consider the hypotheticals, at least at one remove. And you can also consider what you are getting out of this, as long as you aren't, I mean, there are a lot of financial things that I don't really care about one way or another, but if I could learn a lot, okay, sure. If Raytheon would give you a PhD, would you go to work for Raytheon? No. So, I mean, there's a balance. There's a balance. I don't value a PhD that much, but I don't disrespect the person who does.

The PhD was a stand-in for you learning a lot. I get that. Yeah. But I don't disrespect the person who would make a different choice. I'm not sure I'm in that place right now. There might be limits. Yeah.

If I'm not, yeah, yeah. I don't have to respect people who are making weapons. I don't have to disrespect them. That's fair. Everyone gets to make that decision. And regretting things later sometimes means you don't remember that you didn't have as much information.

And so you do the best with the information you have. This is what I'm saying. But there are lines that I won't cross. And that's fine for you. I love that for you. I think we're verging onto an argument here, so maybe we should change topics. Woohoo! You are taking a dog-botic course. Yes, I am.

And you make spooky music that makes me think there's ghosts in the house. So far. Are you having fun? Yes. I am trying to learn. Well, we had, what was their name? Kirk, Kirk Pearson, I think, on the show a few months ago. We should talk about Dogbotic and they do-

Did you use our discount code? No. They do fun electronic music, mostly electronic music, but also film and visual arts courses where they're nine weeks long, I think, and weekly for a couple hours and they're group courses on Zoom, they're remote and they send you all the materials and you get to work on a particular area of electronic music or visual arts like I said. So I'm doing one that's analog drum machine.

So we're working on the electronics to build up to an electronic drum machine from like circa the early 80s, the original drum machines that were not digital. So it's all analog. You have an XOR and a bunch of analog signals going to an XOR. Yeah, I mean, we're using digital logic components, but I mean, I consider it analog. So yeah, I'm trying to kind of learn electronics to get my feet into actually learning electronics to where I can do some projects for myself and know what I'm doing a little bit through a project-based course where it's very casual.

The electronics we're learning, it's explained well, but it's also like, don't sweat the details too much kind of stuff because the kind of thing I want to do I'm not gonna be making a product I don't care about you know if I've got something wrong or yeah so you know I kind of want to get to a familiarity with electronics enough so I can have some fun maybe make good power pedals or synthesizers that kind of thing. So anyway it's been good I've only done it for a couple of weeks. I managed to get in because it got delayed for two weeks and I just noticed it was starting on the day I looked so I did end the materials first day. But yeah for the first two weeks we've just made

inverter based oscillators making square waves. A very simple circuit that I sort of understand now. I still have a question about it, but not quite. I have a Forrest Mims book or six. Well, I don't know if it answers the question, but yeah. And then we're just to the point of making audio with those and mixing a couple of them. Four. Well, I'm only mixing two right now. I have four built.

I didn't get to the point of jamming them all together, but yeah, and you can make some weird noises. So it's gonna progress and hopefully learn kind of more stuff to do with, you know, making amplitude envelopes and all the stuff you need to do to make sounds more, sound more like things instead of whoops. But I'm enjoying it.

Yeah, I'm trying to, I'm a little light on clients and that's sort of slightly by design and I'm trying to... Slightly? Totally. Trying to shift into doing more stuff that I enjoy that doesn't work instead of feeling like I should be working even though I plan not to. Yeah, it's hard as a contractor sometimes taking, it's not really a vacation, it's more like a sabbatical.

In that you have other things to do, your goal is not to just sit on the beach and read, it's to sit on the beach and read technical books. Wait, no, that's not right. Technical books. I want to announce this even though it's really late to join. We are reading Data-Driven Science and Engineering, colon, Machine Learning, Dynamical Systems, and Control

by Stephen Brunton and Nathan Cutts. I came across this book. It's free online. And I was looking for LQR controller, blah, blah blah blah, fancy math. And I liked the book and it came with code and they have videos. And so I wanted to actually read the book from the beginning. So the embedded Patreon Slack has a book club channel, so I decided I was going to take over the book club channel.

The book has a lot of gnarly math, linear algebra and ODE's. So I hired a math prof to help me through it. Don't tell her, she doesn't know that part. She thinks it's for everyone, but I guess the other people can participate if they want. Anyway, MathProf is there to explain things like unitary transforms and stuff. And if you want to join, you support us somehow. Look, it's a buck. If you can't handle a buck, let me know, but the goal is not to milk you dry,

it's just to make sure you're serious and not a robot. And so if you join Slack, you can join the book club and we're even doing online meetings. No, wait, yeah, online meetings. That's where you talk over voice, like Zoom or something. So, we're doing that. In fact, we're going to have to close out this eventually because I have to go do that, but not for a while. I'm enjoying it. It takes the perspective.

Okay, so there's physics and engineering, and you handle, you solve things with math and Fourier and solving equations and ODE's, and then you have CS, which is about optimization and thinking how long things take and finding shorter paths to get to good solutions. And then you have this, they have this idea, what if, what if dynamic systems like PID systems are just data problems? Just like image classification is a data problem. And so they're applying these two areas of engineering fancy math and computer science fancy data handling and putting it together. And it things... Okay, so SVD, Singular Value Decomposition.

I've seen it before with classification. If you have ever taken Andrew Eng's machine learning class, you've seen it. It's a technique, it's not trivial, blah, bunch of linear algebra, not easy. On the other hand, it is just a Python command in NumPy, so not hard. What if this matrix thing you get from singular value decomposition is also Fourier? And they're like, and like part of me is like, okay, basis functions, yes, I get that. And the other part of me is like, whoa, you can't do that. So I'm having a really good time because I just keep getting surprised and that's, I mean, that's how I learn.

The surprise engenders curiosity and curiosity makes me go. So I have that. We're going to be talking to Steve Hinch soon and his book is Winning Through Innovation, Lessons from the Frontlines of Business. Not a title I love, but the book seems pretty interesting and so we'll be talking to him in just a couple of weeks. If you have any questions, let me know. And then, what else?

I have a book about vectors, pretty good. Weird mathematical history. Why do all of the mathematicians die in duels or suicide? It was the 17th century or 18th century. Everyone died in duels or suicide. You either died as an infant or you died in a duel. Those are the two options. I thought it was just mathematicians. And then I am, I love Libby so much. Why did it take me so long? I told you about it. I know. And I've had an account forever. I guess it was, you know, there were some changes with how the big monster does their ebooks and I stopped buying their

ebooks and now I am in love with my library again and I'm not even going. So yeah, Libby, it's an app in the US for public libraries. Digital books, ebooks for libraries basically. And audio books. They have so many audio books. I'm listening to Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, which is like Horatio Hornblower with dragons. And I read them and they were good. I enjoyed reading them, but they were not really on my to reread list. But the audiobooks are just awesome. The voice is fantastic. And I've been trying to read less to give my eyes a break. So the audiobooks, you know, I probably as you are doing now, I fold laundry and do chores and garden, whatever. So yes. Libby has been fantastic for audiobooks. They have a huge selection.

And then, of course, there's the other ones. There's Palace and the whole bunch of library apps. It's amazing. Hubla has a lot of movies, like foreign movies and older movies and stuff. And then you go to canopy There's a lot you can get from your library without even sewing up Okay, oh and you are doing a Terry Pratchett reread reread I don't think I ever read all of it, but I'm going in publication order through all of it. Yes You having fun? Yeah, they're good. I

Found it's very odd to find that, you know, Terry Pratchett writes, if you don't know, it's a very long series, started in the 80s. I think he wrote 40 or 41 books before he died a few years ago. And they are set in a fantasy world that's very kind of us on its face silly. It's a flat world, it's a disc that sits on the back of… Which is called the disc world? It's called disc world, exactly. Sits on the back of four elephants that are in turn sitting on the back of a giant space turtle. Anyway.

Silly. It's got wizards, it's got witches, he has several kind of theme books. So there's wizard books and witch books and books about death and death being a character. And other things like that. And so they're all kind of standalone. Although they do link back to each other in small ways. So you don't need to read them in any particular order. And they all have a theme that he's trying to do. And there's in the depths of the humor, which is good, there's a lot of commentary on human condition, which is kind of dry and very British. But on top of that, he uses a lot of words that I have to look up, which is very impressive

for what's kind of a quote-quote silly series. So I have to look up a half a dozen to a dozen words every book that I've never, never in my life seen before. It's easier now that they're your books. You just push on the word and it pops up the definition. Would you have done that if you were reading a paper? Would you just have context clued? Probably context clued, yeah. Yeah, and I keep meaning to, I've been slowly trying to get back into French and I keep meaning to find some books to read on the e-reader in

French because that's an advantage of reading foreign language books that didn't exist too, being able to push on the... Get the translation. Which for me would be every sixth word, but you know. That's how you learn. I actually got you a French book. Anyway, we'll talk about that later. Well, let's see, what else do we have?

Shockingly, I have discovered that reading technical papers is easier if you already understand most of the material. That whenever I try to go read YOLO and I just give up, it's because I need to read like 10 papers before I get to YOLO. And also I need practice, which is another reason for reading the data-driven science and engineering book. I think that's actually all we have. Was there anything else on your mental list or anything you want to go back to? No, no, I don't think so. That's a lot of stuffs.

All right. Well then, I guess thank you. Thank you for co-hosting and producing. Thank you all for listening. Thank you to JoJo for being quiet until just now. Thank you to our Patreon listener Slack group for doing the book club with me. I appreciate you. I appreciate most of your other questions and comments and all of that. It's pretty cool.

I don't think we're sponsored this week. Good, all right. So no thank you to the sponsors. Although Memphold and Nordic, Nordic bought Memphold. So now I think we should be able to have one commercial for both of them. It's kind of like doing your homework and turning it into two different classes. Okay, so Winnie the Pooh, are you ready? If you want to contact us, embedded.fm.

Sign up for the newsletter, which I meant to send this week. I'm still collating stuff for it. So I'm getting some stuff for the next newsletter. But we do have a newsletter that infrequently posts ostensibly bi-weekly, sometimes weekly. There's good stuff in it. It's small, it's quick. And if you haven't heard about it,

you can go to embedded embeddedfm slash subscribe. Down at the bottom there is a little thing to put your email. We don't sell your email to anyone because who would buy from us? And yeah, people keep saying, oh, there's a newsletter. And I'm surprised that people don't know this newsletter. Yeah, there's a newsletter.

It's often really good and really short, which is kind of weird. Okay, so Winnie the Pooh. Piglet has gotten into Kanga's pocket and Rue has been stolen by Rabbit in an effort to get the newcomers Kanga and Rue to leave. A newcomer? Is that a brand new cucumber? The newcomers to leave the Hundred Acre Forest. Why, where's Rabbit? said Kanga, turning round again.

Are you all right, Rue dear? Piglet made a squeaky noise from the bottom of Kanga's pocket. Rabbit had to go away, said Pooh. I think he thought of something he had to go and see about suddenly. And Piglet? I think Piglet thought of something at the same time, suddenly. Well, we must be getting home, said Kanga. Goodbye, Pooh. And in three large jumps, she was gone.

Pooh looked after her as she went. I wish I could jump like that, he thought. Some can, some can't. That's how it is. But there were moments when Piglet wished that Kanga couldn't. Often he had wished on a long walk home through the forest, he had wished that he was a bird. But now he thought jerkily to himself at the bottom of Kanga's pocket, if this is flying, I shall never take to it.

And he went up in the air and said, ooh. And he came down and said, ow. And he went on saying, ooh, ow, ooh, ow, ooh, ow, all the way to Kenga's house. Of course, as soon as Kenga unbuttoned her pocket, she saw what had happened. Just for a moment, she thought she was frightened, and then she knew she wasn't. For she was quite sure that Christopher Robin would never let anything harm Rue. So she said to herself, if they are having a joke with me, I will have a joke with them. Now then, Rue dear, she said to the, as she took Piglet out of her pocket, bedtime.

Aha! said Piglet, as well as he could after his terrifying journey. But it wasn't a very good aha, and Kanga didn't seem to understand what it meant. Bath first, said Kanga in a cheerful voice. Aha! Said Piglet again, looking around anxiously for the others, but the others weren't there. Rabbit was playing with Baby Roo in his own house and feeling more fond of him every moment. And Poo, who had decided to be Kanga, was still at the sandy place on top of the forest practicing jumps. I am not at all sure, said Kanga in a thoughtful voice, that it wouldn't be a good idea to

have a cold bath this morning. Would you like that, Rue, dear?" Piglet, who had never really been fond of baths, shuddered a long indignant shudder and said in a brave voice, as he could, "'Kanga, I see the time has come to speak plainly." "'Funny little Rue,' said Kanga as she got the bath water ready. "'I am not Rue,' said Pingle loudly. "'I am Piglet!' "'Yes, dear, yes,' said Kanga soothingly, and imitating Piglet's voice, so clever of

him." She went on, and she took a large bar of yellow soap out of the cupboard. "'What will he be doing next?' "'Can't you see?' shouted Piglet. "'Haven't you got eyes? Look at me!' "'I am looking rude, dear,' said Kanga rather severely.

"'And you know what I told you yesterday about making faces. If you go on making faces like Piglet, you will grow to look like Piglet. And then think how sorry you'll be. Now then, into the bath. And don't let me have to speak to you about this again." Before he knew where he was, Piglet was in the bath, and Kanga was scrubbing him firmly with a large leathery flannel.

"'Ow,' said Piglet. "'Let me out, I'm Piglet.' "'Don't open your mouth, dear, or you'll get soap in," said Kanga. There! What did I tell you? You did that on purpose! sputtered Piglet, as soon as he could speak again, and then accidentally add another mouthful of leathery flannel. That's right, dear. Don't say anything," said Kanga. In another minute, Piglet was out of the bath and being rubbed dry with a towel.

Now, said Kanga, there's your medicine and then bed. Oh, what medicine? said Piglet. To make you grow big and strong dear, you don't want to grow up small and weak like Piglet, do you? Well then. At the moment, there was a knock at the door. Come in, said Kangaisia White here with Christopher White.

It's going to be just us. We talk about rolls, sticks, and... Rolls. Rolls. Rolls. Rolls. Rolls. Rolls.

Rolls. Rolls. Rolls. Rolls. Rolls. Rolls. Rolls. Rolls. New with Christopher White. It's gonna be just us. We talk about rolls, sticks and... Rolls? Dinner rolls? No. Oh, okay. And not cinnamon rolls.

Like rolls, like job rolls? No. Like rolling things? Rolls Royce? Hello and welcome to embedded. Wait a minute. Fine.