Embedded - 517: A Direct, Sensible Podcast

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

Nathan Jones and Chris Svec give Chris and Elecia their 2025 performance review.  Donations went to Elevate Tutoring, an organization that provides funding and support to low-income and first-generation college students as well as free STEM tutoring for underserved schools.  Embedded has already sent in the match to the donations for a total of over $5000.  Here is a list of all Embedded.fm episodes. We mentioned the Foldscope, a small but mighty microscope. Also, mentioned was the book If I Only Changed the Software, Why is the Phone on Fire? The show this week is sponsored by us. And you. Please consider supporting Embedded.fm on Ko-fi or Patreon. Or tell a friend about the show. Transcript

Hello, I am Elysio White, here with Christopher White. Welcome to Embedded podcast review. We have Nathan Jones and Chris Feck here to provide some feedback on how we did this year. This is our performance review? It is exactly our performance review. What can I expect in terms of compensation, increase, and a new title? Well, I already have a page open on how. to deal with negative feedback, so.

Great. Performance reviews are unrelated to merit or bonus or promotions and raises. They're as, yeah, Mike, every HR thing will tell you that. Speck, will you introduce yourself as if we, I don't know, met on a podcast 10 years ago? Well, 10 years ago would be quite a bit different. But today I'm Chris Feck, although I was Chris Feck 10 years ago. as well. And I work as a director of embedded software at Insulate. It's a medical device company. We make an insulin pump. Prior to, prior to doing embedded software for that, I have

worked at companies like IRobot, and I've worked at a number of chip companies doing embedded stuff, doing chip design. And I have been a long time listener of the podcast, perhaps, I think back to episode one, back before podcast. You were the one. I was the one. I might have been the first. I might to have been the first. But yeah, enjoying the show and looking forward to hopefully giving you some of the feedback that the audience, the listeners gave as part of this survey this year. And Nathan Jones, it's been about a year since we talked to you and some things have changed for you.

How would you introduce yourself these days? I would say I'm a freelance educator and embedded systems engineer who, when I'm not enjoying, and fulfilling my role as husband and father of two get to write some great articles and record some videos for Digiqi. I have been clinically dead. I once shook the hand of the president and I've fallen out of more than 20 aircraft

and one of those three is a lie. I'm going to go with the aircraft as true. president is true and you were abducted by aliens is the lie no i clinically dead was the first one and i have been you never said abducted by aliens so you made up a lie for me you made up a lie it's clever it's very clever i'm i'm going to guess it was president shake the hand he already said good one oh wait yeah president all right yeah yeah we eliminate it well that yes what are we us? Well, first of all, Nathan, could you tell us about Elevate tutoring?

Virginia was not where you work, but it is a company, a group organization you are familiar with. It is, yeah. It was founded by a guy named Bob Schaefer who taught at Harvey Mudd College for a while, and I got to meet him there. And so he started this nonprofit called Elevate Tutoring, and my wife and I, were early donors, and it's got a really neat mission. They're trying to help get first-generation high school students into and through college,

but they do so with this really neat kind of circular approach where high school students will get tutored to, you know, gain success in high school and apply to colleges and get into colleges. And the nonprofit provides them grants, as my understanding, to get through college, and they only thing it asks of them once they're there is to come back and provide more tutoring. And so, you know, hopefully sets up this process where it's almost kind of self-sustaining. And so this year on the survey, I thought it would be a great opportunity to try to raise some money for them. And so there's a link where folks could do that, which you and Chris have generously

agreed to match. And as of today, it looks like we've raised over $2,400, not including year matching donation, which is just stupendous. I'm sure they're going to love it, and I really appreciate the wonderful generosity of all the listeners to go in and do that. I think we'll just round it up to 5K. It's a nice round number. Very nice. I'm curious, what kind of tutoring, like, what is it subjects?

What kind of content do you and your wife have you, like, talk with high school students about? So we're not tutors ourselves. I mean, honestly, our connection with the organization is just that we know. Bob well, and we love supporting them in their mission. And when I thought I had this potentially this cool opportunity with the survey to benefit someone at the end of the year, they were one of the first ones that came to my mind. Got it.

Are all the mentors then high school graduates have gone through it, or do they have non-high school, like non-people who've been in it before to do the mentoring as well? Sounds to me like Svec wants Bob to be on the show. Sure. I actually do plan on asking Bob to be on the show. We're not going to get into too many details there other than it's a great organization, and it has a nice long, long tail benefit that was pretty exciting when Nathan brought it up. Okay, so having cut off spec, knowing that he's going to be one of people delivering the bad news. Maybe, okay, wait.

Why do you assume your review is going to be bad news? It's always bad news. I think most engineers I always assume that it's going to be bad news. Maybe even... I was going to lead with the bad news, which at least you, Chris, I hate to break it to you, but folks really like your show. Mm-hmm. So we're sorry.

We're doing our best to fix that. We're sorry. We're so sorry to tell you of this news. It gets worse. Chris, you're one of the favorite parts of the show. No. That's true. Specifically mentioned several times.

as one of the marks, people said, well, never mind. It's a great quote. So Nathan, you put together this survey, which we really appreciate. We've done a couple of these in the past. Right. Some of them we did,

and Nathan's done this twice for us this time. Well, I stopped doing it a while back when I realized I didn't actually read the whole end of the survey. Like, I didn't, I wasn't going to take any action on it. So I was like, it's too hard. Right.

It needs to go through another lens. Yeah. And what I found, too, in the end of semester surveys, is I have to wait until the point when I don't really care about the answers, because otherwise it's too emotional to read them. Exactly. Need some distance. Yep. Do you miss teaching, Nathan?

Oh, yeah. I'm going to go back at some point. Middle Tennessee State University is right here in Murphysboro, and I'm pretty sure the next. the next time we talk, I'll tell you a story about how I walked into the electrical engineering department and just said,

you need to let me teach a couple courses here. Well, where should we get started? Do you just want to go through the highlights, the low lights, the... What if we first start off with, maybe Nathan,

you can tell us what was on your mind as you created the questions, kind of give a quick overview of like what were the main questions, that kind of for people who haven't taken the survey. So it looks like, you know, how many listeners do you all have? Do you know? At least you two. At least two. At least two. And honestly, if you got more responses than that, I filled out the survey too. I didn't. So subtract one. We have many

thousands of listeners. Many thousands. All right. So, yeah. So Nathan, what were you thinking? And maybe go through how you came up with it i mean i got the idea last year we were talking about maybe doing an end of year episode and i thought it'd just be really fun um to to do sort of an end-a-year kind of recap um and that the first one was uh totally split between fun goofy questions and um and and asking folks you know what was their favorite uh episode or a moment on the show and you know what sorts of things would they, you know, want to say to Chris and Alicia if they had the chance. So, and so this year I thought, well, I'll just, I'll do it again. So, you know, again, real mix of some, some fun, goofy questions and some of, you know,

asking people, you know, how well the show is doing what they can do to improve. And this year, Chris and Alicia also asked to add a couple in there in terms of, like, where people are listening and how they're listening, and that'll give them some good data for, you know, what direction to take the show next year. Cool. Yeah, so right out the gate, just like last year, we decided to ask a very serious question. We said, folks, we asked,

would you rather, A, finish one tip everyone should know, or B, start a fictional robot. I can't even tell you how many times I have started a fictional robot. Yeah, yeah. So many times. You'll be happy to know that one by a slim margin, about 53% to 47%. Wow, that's very tight.

Alicia, what fictional robot would you start if you could? Well, no, I was kind of serious, actually. Before Abo's came out, I wanted to make a robotic dog. I think that was like 96, 97. I thought I was going to make a romantic cat. I still have some of the parts for that project. But since then, it's always been like, I don't actually want to do the work, but I do, you know, think about it a lot.

So I've started plenty of fictional robots. A recent one? Well, I've been doing a lot of origami over the holidays, and so I have some more origami robots where I need extra hands to hold things. I would like a dock-style set of four arms that I could kind of like the the engineering hand things where you clip things, but I need it to be much bigger. Dr. Origami would be a good supervillain.

Yes. Would your arms have... The paper cuts. Would your arms have their own personality, your robotic arms? Of course. Okay, good. I'm just picturing your typing robot

sort of accuracy along with these giant, heavy, like skull, crashing, gold-crushing capable robot arms, so. Well, that's another fictional robot. Yeah, the typing robot was pretty fictional. It was. I did start it, but when you tell the typing robot to type hello, and it types help instead, it's like you really can't go up from there.

That is the pinnacle. And so I couldn't continue. That was the personality in my head, like the typing robot, like you dictating to it and it's just adding its own commentary into the. email like she's been erasing this sentence for 40 minutes you just need to stop reading here and like send her a reply yeah entire point of that project was to be as janky as possible and see if you could make it work and in fact the arm was as janky as possible was that your first foray into like modeling a robotic system and doing doing that kind of a pipeline the software pipeline

that went with it i had already had experience with ross in automotive vehicle areas And in fact, some of the hardware I was using was related to automotive autonomous vehicle area. So no. And I've done control system. No, definitely not. But you hadn't worked with an arm. But I hadn't done kinematics yet. Yeah, that was it.

Okay. And that was a big shift for me. I remembered something being new in that area. And I forgot what. Yeah, all of the kinematics and then trying to use a camera to deal with the. problems of a very cheap off-the-shelf are the cheapest. The cheapest. And this is how this is going to go.

We're going to wind away. Nobody reminisce about random things. If we go through this. If you want a direct sensible podcast, you're going to have to sign up for the Patreon so you can listen to the anime episode. December 30th. I don't think people can expect much from us. I haven't even started drinking yet.

I think you'll see you from the results that people are okay. We're okay with what you all are putting out. But I don't want to spoil it, but there you go. Yeah, so that's a good segue to the next question. We did get a little more serious. We asked if there was a favorite quote moment or guest from the past year and got a lot of great responses. Lots of folks called out their favorite episodes.

A lot of votes went to episode 501 with Dr. Meredith-Paul. and Akeba Hang. Oh, yes. Inside the armpit of a giraffe. Or someone referred to it as they just put giraffe buttbirds. Yes. Yes. Yeah.

I mean, giraffe, giraffe butt birds pretty much, pretty much says it all right there. That really is the epitome of the podcast. Which is such a great book because it was a, it was a wonderful episode. I mean, those, they were great guests. You know, they'd so many funny stories about animals on the Savannah. And a lot of folks mentioned that they just really enjoyed, you know, remembering that, you know, the work that they do, the tech work, the science work, it has, it can have a really useful purpose. It can serve the scientific community in really neat ways. I made you talk, ask one question about our mission, which I don't know if anybody realizes we actually do have a mission.

Can I ask what the responses were on that one? Yeah, so don't take this the wrong way, but I didn't know the podcast at a mission, which was to encourage people to stay in STEM areas to foster learning and community and to inspire people to make amazing things. We have a slight bias towards guests who might be in underrepresented in tech categories, but the greatest qualifications are enthusiasm for technology and an interest in sharing knowledge. I thought it was destroy all planets.

We've been doing... No, no, you thought it was destroy all plants, which explains what happens to the yard. That's how she roped you into doing the audio engineering for the episode. All right. I guess we have a mission. We've always had a mission. I know.

Yeah, I do feel like there was a period of time where you maybe talked about the mission more, like during the episodes, or at least mentioned it somehow in there. So I'm not super surprised to hear Nathan say that, like, he didn't know there was one. I think at some point we decided to just do what we were, be guided by it and not explicitly go. I mean, talking about diversity in technology is not as interesting as showcasing it. I would much rather talk to interesting people from different areas about what they're working on instead of

talking about how hard it is. You want the engineering talk and the projects and products and science and stories and stuff and you want them to be about embedded systems and you want them to be from people who are perhaps underrepresented in tech and coming at it from a different angle than, you know, the average sort of middle of the industry.

Is that a fair statement? Yeah. Cool. Well, so the specific question that Nathan wrote out was, what was the best example? example this year of the show accomplishing that mission and the the bird butt giraffe whatever came up came up in there as as an as a pretty frequent answer to it along with sort of more generic people people were saying you know you have science on there difficult to pick an excellent

or it's very difficult to pick a single example. And, you know, artists, makers, hobbyists, people who are making things. So nothing stuck out, like, as a single winner on here for me. I don't know, Nathan, as you were coming to the results, did anything kind of smack you over the head? Yeah, I would wrap all that up together. And I would say, I think a lot of folks, you know, of course, we're never going to get rid of the technical content. And that's maybe the first reason why people come to the podcast. But they said over and over again that they love the diversity of guests, the fact that they're non-technical guests and artistic guests and folks that, you know, are either using tech in really fascinating or new or weird or novel ways or maybe came at tech from a different angle, maybe didn't necessarily have a technical background, but are still doing fun things.

So I think, Alicia, like, you know, that's the thing that you are going for. That's the thing that people love about the show that you're going to talk about. the tech but they get to see a picture of it that's more human and selfishly there's no way we were going to survive doing this show for 500 episodes by talking to a bunch of developers all the time about you know day-to-day embedded systems development that's just that's a that's a that's a that's a show that stops after 150 episodes or 200 episodes yeah yeah at least for me like I'm not going to be able to do that yeah one one one quote that I think was in this question, but I saw it echoed elsewhere, was someone saying,

seeing all the guests being nice, friendly, normal people and not superhuman beings showed me that we can do anything. And so I think something else that people came to this with was saying like you all kind of share a humanity, whether it's talking about burnout, whether it's talking about failures or mistakes. What are you trying to say? I'm saying people love watching you screw up, Chris. That's what I was saying. You make a lot of mistakes, Chris. You make a lot of mistakes. People have judgment for you. Okay, we got to back that quote up, though, because I do have that one written down also as a fact, and it's just stupendous. It starts with, sometimes I feel unmotivated and bored. Listening to this fixes it. Sometimes I feel anxious and alone. Again, listening to this fixes it. There are also the times where I feel weak and stupid. And listening to this podcast with seeing others achieve kind of makes me jealous. And then, But seeing all the guests being nice, friendly, normal people, and not superhuman beings shows me that we can do anything. That's very lovely sentiment. And also, this is going to be the second time I said this on the air this year, but it sounds like I should listen to my own podcast.

Yeah, you should. No. That was, I mean, I wanted to make a joke about I was the one who wrote that, but I didn't, and it's so sweet. So whoever wrote it, thank you. I'm glad you didn't. That would have been awkward. That would have been pretty awkward. there's others as well people you know just speaking to the humanity of you too that

bring it as not just a technical you know this weak in tech kind of a thing or business or whatever but as a you know we're a bunch of humans figuring this out and here's some people who have a very traditional embedded or sorry traditional academic background with a PhD and blah blah blah and they're doing it and here's people who have no you know no quote unquote you know background or formal background or formal training in something who are also doing exciting interesting things and then here's someone who goes in the middle of the wilds and finds birds flying out of animals' butts. And so, you know, it's all in there.

It's all interesting. It's all good stuff. Dr. Palmer's like shouting at her stereo right now. Yeah, I... We had a couple this year that I was happy. Christina Sear and Sophie Kravitz both talked about leaving technology for a while and coming back and not finding it as egregiously difficult. as they had been led to believe, which was kind of nice for me.

I know Chris took a little while off. Hey, I've done that three times. I'm always a little worried if I take too much time off. I will never manage to get my brain around it again. So it was nice for me to hear them. And it is, yeah, it's one of the reasons I do the show is so that I can talk to people and ask them about things like that. And I wonder if Sophie's episode is the,

The other one that might be good for fits the mission. The whole fits the mission, the reason I asked you to ask about it, is because I really am going to apply to a stupid award, okay? And so I have to give them a mission, and they have to give them an episode, and I need it to match. So I'll probably do the draft one because it is awesome. Do you think the awards people like being called stupid on the show? I'm not putting this one episode in,

and I don't think they'll have time to listen to all of them. All right. So I hope not. So, Sophia Cravitz's episode was 516, voices from the cataclysms of the universe in which she tells us how many, was it, how many cosmic rays are penetrating your skull-sized object at any given second? Is that it? Yes. Yes. All I know is that it's a shame I don't have superpowers at this point.

I know. Was it like one particle per second per human-sized skull? It was on the order. Every three seconds or something. Every three seconds, okay. There was some small number every. Yeah. Elisa, you say that I've left and come back several times or whatever, and that's true. But you saw me a couple of weeks ago when this other project came back up, and I was doing embedded stuff for the real embedded stuff again for the first time in probably eight months.

Everything you complained about was the Arduino interface that the client wanted to use. Okay, that was part of it. But there was some other whining. Yes, but it wasn't. But there was a lack of confidence. So I'm saying. It was more about confidence than ability. I was very, very insecure about it. So your next question kind of that goes in with that one is what's something the podcast could do next year to accomplish that mission even better. And here, a lot of people said like nothing, keep up the good work.

Oh, right. I'm good at nothing. It's so doing nothing, starting now. No, no, keeping up the good work. Oh. It's the part of. It's not the nothing. Right.

A number of people had, you know, guests from outside of the U.S., more women. And tech people, more women makers, even ones who used to work in tech, but don't anymore, which kind of goes along with what you just think. So people who have left tech, but didn't come back. Maybe that could be interesting. Some people talk about technical topics. I'm not sure if that relates to the mission of your specific mission here. But some people are saying, hey, more technical deeper, deeper dives. Don't change is one.

Work at a sustainable pace is another. Every other week is so much easier. That's good. When did you all start doing every other week instead of every week? At least a year ago. I think it was around 400. I think it might have been earlier. Yeah.

It was a while ago. It was a while ago. It's been so worth it. Cool. That's really good. I mean, I definitely do enjoy your episodes as much as you're willing to put out. And I think something else people have said is we enjoy the episodes. but it's more important that you all are motivated and healthy to do it all.

So we'll take half as much rather than zero. What are the two of you, have you thought about what you might do next year to just continue the great work? I'd be lying if I said I thought a lot about it. Fair. I mean, I'm always scoping out guests. Yeah, that's the really hard part that I think people probably don't realize is that finding an interesting, you know, guest who we're interested in talking to, who has a good topic every two weeks. And is available. And is available. I have one guest I've been stalking for almost a

year now. And we trade emails. And each time it starts with, I'm sorry I haven't talked to you. I'm available in six months. And then, like, I will reply and say, oh, my calendar is booked out for three months and then it will it just goes on so eventually this person will be on the show and they'll probably be terrible after all this time or more likely they will be awesome and it will be worth it like that's 99% at least yeah like i bring in a guest once in a blue moon accidentally but she does all that booking work so that's someone follows you home and you're like i guess we could have them on the show yes sure that's why we've had several deer and a skunk on the show You had the cat on a show.

That was 100% my idea. She booked the cat. She booked the cat. But yeah, no, that's a ton of work, and she does all of that. And, you know, you have to keep the pipeline full a little bit in advance. Otherwise, you know, you're scrambling. And I do have folks who are on my list if I... Emergency guests.

Emergency guests. And I do see it a few of just Chris and me. Well, and folks like those, too. I got, there are definitely a couple of comments on the survey that said, you know, sometimes I just really enjoy listening to Alicia and Chris talk to each other. Yeah, I think people enjoy the, people enjoy the informality of that because, I mean, clearly, you do know each other and like each other and you, I don't know if you let your guard down a little more, but you certainly, you know, talk about kind of the daily sort of the daily life of an embedded systems person and a human being of like kind of the problems you're facing or burnout. And you kind of go into more some of that. Again, the human side of things. It's just definitely less formal, which people seem to connect with in the survey results.

I remember, like, episode 12 or something. I don't. And we got listener feedback from somebody who was a long-time listener. It has been a long-time listener. Oh, but having you were a long-time listener at episode 12. I want to say Stephen. But he said it didn't seem like we liked each other. What?

And then... Wait, what, I wasn't even on most of those episodes. You weren't on very often. You would, like, a voice occasionally. And then I think we did the show with the wine bottle, the one about imposter syndrome. And then he wrote back, he said, never mind.

I don't remember, I don't remember seeing that feedback. Because it was so awkward for me. I'm like, I do like him. I probably would have. It's probably good I didn't see it because I probably would have written back in irate. If we were doing an interview show and you had popped in a question, I wasn't ready. I do get, you know, blind or focused sometimes.

And now we face each other. Then we didn't. I don't think you can assess any show at episode 12. Yeah, I don't know what we were doing. I have vague memories of Chris being maybe dragooned. I think that's the right word into coming on the show as a co-host instead of just behind the scenes. And I have no memory of when or how that happened. and if it was my idea or her idea or at some point.

I think there was, at some point, we decided that occasionally someone needed to keep things on track. Yes, and that I could not be held responsible for doing that all the time. Especially when, like, Jen was on the show, we would just giggle for an hour. Not surprised about that. So I think that's how that ended up happening. Yeah, I had no intention of ever being on the show for the first while. And here you are the favorite, favorite element. Wait, I got to read this. I got to do this.

Hang on. Specifically, you and AI were mentioned. Oh, great. Two quotes. I could listen to Chris, go into Old Man, Shakespeare, at Clouds, Rants about AI for hours. I do. yeah you you listeners uh i don't i don't stop that when i'm off the show just just so you know that that continues daily all the pent-up aggression it just spills out once the mics are off

yeah who you're calling old by the way uh next uh well okay so hang up so yeah uh i think uh per the question right i think um we got a lot of the feedback was you know yeah just keep finding people interesting guests to have on the show. But, you know, folks really like a diverse set of guests and then enjoy the two of you talking to each other. So I think one of the best things you can do next year is just continue to find great guests and give yourself the permission for those guests to come from really different and unique places as long as it's of interest to you. The guests love that. And if you want to be a guest on the show, it's the best way, is to send an email that indicates you have definitely listened to the show.

Or definitely put the show through chat GPT and had it pretend that you listen to the show. And then talk about what you're doing that is making the world a better place. If you just tell me I made this thing, I might go look at your thing, but you've heard the mission now. I want to keep people in STEM. I want to build a community. I want to educate people. I want more diverse voices. You know, kind of like if you're submitting for a job application in that cover letter,

go ahead and stress those ideas about how you are doing those things too. Wow, serious. And don't ask me if you can pay to be on the show because I just delete those now. I can't even. What about sponsored content? Sponsored content. We're going to put a blog post on your website. We get so much junk, man.

We want to insert our own show in your show. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, but I am often looking for good people, and sometimes my inbox gets a little busy, but I do eventually get to most things. And if I haven't, feel free to email again. Like I said, tell me you listen to the show and you know what you're getting into. And that would be good. I want to say one thing there to make sure people don't self-select out.

So, you know, your vision for the show, the goal for the show is, or the mission, sorry, the mission is to encourage people in STEM, to keep people in, to inspire people to make amazing things. Amazing things doesn't have to mean, you know, you're doing Nobel Prize winning stuff. It doesn't have to mean you're doing, you know, world changing or science changing or, you know, that kind of stuff. it can also mean you are doing interesting and, you know, fun things with light up jewelry or some sort of fashion thing or some, I don't know, bus stop monitoring system. I'm making stuff up here, but I'm just, I think, Alisi, what you're saying is you want people to know what the show's about, you know, not be trying to sell something, that kind of a thing.

And also, people should feel free to put a positive spin in what they're doing. But it's not like it has to be Nobel Prize worthy in order for you to have them on the show. show. No, no. I mean, the end of the mission is we prefer, we have a slight preference, slight preference to folks who are underrepresented in technology, but the main qualification is an enthusiasm for talking about technology. Yeah, I mean, and we don't want people to say, hey, I made the squirrel blender 3,000, and I want to talk about it. I mean, you can, you can email us that, but please don't include pictures. Here, I'll set the floor. If you could be more interesting than talking about a half-baked book idea about computer architecture.

I like that. It was a great episode. And it was a good lead up to Nanda Tetris. It was good. But if you're more interesting than that, which hopefully, I think all of you out there, it can think of something more interesting than that, and you want to be on the show, send Elyssia an email. Yeah.

Speaking of books, one of the questions was, when Alicia hears mention of a third edition of her book, she's already written two editions of her book, her most likely reaction will be. Go ahead and guess, Alicia. So the answers were no, hell no, nope, nope, nope, or I'll think a nope sandwich with extra nope sauce. So which of those four was the clear winner?

I think was there an other one on that one? Because I may have entered an other that said, I've actually thought about this and I would want to do more electronics in it. But I think that would be a different book. And sadly, I don't think I'm the person to write that book. so yay but I'm not as

nope nope nope as I was that was like just a year ago I know it wore off much sooner it's like the what are the chemicals in women's brains that makes them forget the the birth

when they have a baby it's like you wrote the book and a year later you're like it wasn't that bad well I don't think you should to do a third edition anytime soon. No. But I do think about other things. The clear answer was, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.

64%, 65% almost, followed by the nope sandwich, followed by no, and then hell no, no, was the hell no, no, no, was each one of these had a little image to go with it. And the nope, nope, nope one was the nope octopus, that little gift of the octopus, just like running across the seaflo. Definitely. So my guess is a lot of folks picked up on the octopus, yeah. Yeah, very on brand, brand. You asked, there was a separate question which said what content should be added, extended, or, you know, inserted into the book. And it was kind of, there was a lot of stuff on there, a lot of topics, hardware, audio, DMA specific things.

She should consider therapy first, which I thought was an excellent answer. Part of my favorite one was integrating a dev kit into the software. spine of the book. Truly novel. Which, I would love. Yeah. I mean, you can have the same form factor as the rulers. That's great as long as people want the book to cost $350.

No, whatever. You've got all the paper circuits, right? They've got microcontrollers that would connect. I mean, you could literally put, no, you could, you wouldn't even need to, in the manufacturing, you wouldn't even need to, like, place it somewhere. Like, you could just include a sticker sheet with the, like, the chibby, paper circuits and like tell and have spots, have activities in the book where folks are like putting stickers down and like connecting circuits.

Chris got me a fold-up magnifying glass for Christmas. I'm sorry, microscope. That's cool. And it's origami-ish. And it's got all of these, it feels very sticker electronics, but it has the objectives. And I'm not, you know, this, this, all right, there would be. kind of cool. Definitely post a link. I can't picture that. So post a link to that in the show notes, please.

Yeah. Do you remember foldable? Foldscope. Foldscope. Foldscope. Cool. That's cool. Lisa, you mentioned electronics. So, like, more, like, the hardware side, like, how do you physically connect to sensors and set up a little amplifier or something like that? Yeah.

Going through the art of electronics is. arduous and in a world of digital electronics with only a little bit of analog I'm not convinced

everyone needs to have that information but most of us should be able to come up with the resistor divider network

to make our signal smaller and yet every time I do that Let's just go back to first principles and start over instead of – I know that there's Forrest Mims books that do this, and I just never have the right one in front of me. So this goes back to some of my book is just wanting to have all of the information in front of me at one time. It depends on the goal, too, because your book is semi – I believe your audience is intended to be professionals or people wanting to be professionals. and the level of

it's a difficult balance to strike because like the drum machine course that I took, which is not for professionals, it's for people who want to make weird electronic synthesizers and things. A lot of the electronics was just, well, you know, this is what it does. This is how you plug this together.

Experiment with it, but I'm not going to tell you how to, you know, the IDT relates to Oms Law and whatever's happening here or, you know, this differential equation or how this impedance does this. It's just, this is the tricks we've learned and you can experiment. You're not going to blow anything up. And you'll gain knowledge that way. For professional audience, I don't think that cuts it. Yeah. And so you'd have to... That's always the

problem. Yeah. And you could do some things like that. You could say, well, this is how you, this is how a microcontroller would connect to this sensor and you need, you know, these passives for this reason. But, you know, most of the time, but it's really hard. Suddenly you're making an electronics book, right? And there's always the, well, actually, and the it depends. And you're going to get a lot of review. That's the worry is like, the reviews are like, well, this isn't really an electronics book. What is this, you know, you've, yeah. So it would be difficult to not have people miss the point. Well, and that's probably why it's not really that good of an idea.

I didn't say it wasn't a good idea. I'm saying. I should just make a journal for myself. You're right. It's probably a different book. But, I mean, I like the idea of, you know, hey, we're going to teach you enough physical electronics that, you know, when you try to use this. stuff in this book, you don't, you know, you don't spend, you don't waste a week and a half realizing you forgot to put pull-up resistors on your I-squared C line.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that sort of thing. So that goes into a couple other suggestions that might be included in the book. It was a whole new chapter, someone said, on interesting bugs or war stories. It's always fun to learn from other's mistakes. So something like, here is how Ice Squared C will burn you. Here is how Spy will burn you. here's how you know USB will burn you and you know that's the whole book the pull up the pull up resistors you know you could have something kind of like kind of like the interview questions at

the end of his chapter you could have you could even include something like that i realized i just started trying to talk alicia into writing another edition of our book anyway i'll stop that yeah no i think the big book the big book of bugs this is a good idea though just new book the big book bugs yeah well and to give you some inspiration i'll plug a book that I've loved it's called it's by Lisa Simone it's called if I only changed the software why is the phone on fire yes yes yes familiar years ago but that is a good book um quick time check which is something I say in my professional life and I've never said outside of a professional meeting but here we are um this unprofessional call we we've we've been recording for maybe

43 minutes um I'm sure Chris Chris will probably cut some of the sudden and we are maybe halfway done with the survey. So I don't know, Nathan, how do we want to, Nathan and I didn't talk through this at all either. Very professional, Lewis. Do we want to kind of speed through some stuff, or any of the big highlights you want to hit? I mean, there's kind of a whole section of talking about how folks were listening and how often they listen, we can kind of skip. To me, that I would say the last kind of big three I've got in my notes were, Talking about the learning opportunities slash failures, any recommendations for future bonus episodes or anything else you'd like to share with Alicia and Chris.

Yeah, I think those are really good things to dig in. I'll do. So first of all, something we didn't mention is there's 69 people who respond to the survey. And so depending on how many thousands of people are actually listening, so it's about 70 people. So, you know, anywhere between 1% and 10% of people responded to the survey. I'm just making numbers up, but it's kind of close-ish. It's about one, which is the expectation for any response to anything. Yeah.

So that's okay. I will say that you have a part in here that says, let's see, as simple. Okay, here it is. Are you willing to answer a few more questions to help benefit the show? And of the 69 people who answered any of the survey, 68 said yes, and they continued on. So you have people who answer the survey with people who want to spend a little more time and help the show. I just want to make that point. All right, Nathan, what do you think we should have?

hit next um we asked it what topic should at leasty and chris explore next year is any one that would be neat for them to interview and again got a lot of really a lot of great responses so you got a great list leasing chris of of uh of ideas for for next year i thought one that was cool was to try to find someone who worked on the core rope memory uh for like the NASA missions oh wow yeah um it's been uh i watched some videos a year or so ago about the apollo guidance computer And, like, that age of computer engineering to me is so fascinating. Yes, we'd be into that. Yes, definitely.

And people have given a number of very specific, like, you should get this person or this person on there. So that's, that's hopefully a helpful pointer. If you know that person and you made that suggestion, please, email introduction. It's so much better for me. Not just because it's easier, just because then the other person doesn't delete my email a spam. Yep. Yeah, that connection helps. So they should email you at show at embedded.fm, probably.

Yes, please. Yeah, next, I asked, what was your biggest field? I mean, learning opportunity, which is my attempt to hopefully help normalize and reframe, you know, what we consider to be, you know, unsavory moments of our memories. But, you know, I think there's a lot there to, to own someone on the Slack channel a while ago thought it would be really funny for folks

engineers to introduce themselves as like hi I'm Nate Jones here's the most amount of money I've ever wasted at a company doing you know so blowing something up or whatever right right which I love well one of the respondents one of the respondents here said they killed a $25,000 piece of equipment by wiring it up wrong so that's that's good this bold um there was a few people talking about killing, killing electronics by doing, doing the wrong thing. Which, and hopefully at that point, right, your employer did the same thing. What was it at IBM or Intel and someone made a $10 billion mistake and they thought they were going to get fired?

And they said, I'm not going to fire you. I just invested $10 billion in you. That's right. Jeez. Yep. Yeah, but there was a good array of answers to this one. There was people, you know, blew up a power supply, killed that piece of equipment. Let's see.

accidentally deleting data from prod that kind of stuff burnout learning to bite my tongue with customers stop accepting exploitative side gigs so it just definitely a different range of a range of is trying to handle my mother's estate without real

legal assistance I mean there's there's real good honest answers in here so yeah you know good example of mine was um so we moved to Tennessee in uh in in July and like a couple weeks before that

I drove the 24-foot moving truck from New York to Tennessee with my friend and my daughter. And I got, you know, in like six days, drove, loaded it up, drove to Tennessee, unloaded it in like 20 hours, and then started driving back. And then got almost all the way back. And my wife said, hey, how much did the truck weigh? And that's when it hit me that if the Army was going to reimburse me for my move, they were going to need to know how much I moved.

and I forgot to weigh the truck. And so, yeah, I probably, that was probably a $20,000 mistake. And I just had to not think about it for a couple of days. And at this point, I just, anytime I think about it, I tell myself, I'm not allowed to miss something I never had to begin with. Oh, boy. That is, I mean, thanks for admitting that. That's painful.

But, yeah, good learning opportunity. one of one of my favorite interview questions i forget how i read some management book in the last couple years and uh shoot i'll have to look it up for the show notes but um the author she um especially as hiring for managers she views coachability as one of the strongest indicators that someone's going to do well especially in a management or leadership job and so one of her kind of favorite questions which i have stolen shamelessly is tell me about um the time where you received some feedback, some feedback that you had to like change something about the way you do or the way you act, the way you whatever, and what was the feedback and

how was delivered to you? And what did you do as a result of that feedback? And I've really found that to be an excellent question to kind of figure out if people are, you know, it can at least come up with an example of something where they've been told, hey, you know, you need to change something. Here's how to change it. I like that. We'll just add that to lightning round. Lightning round down. That's a heavy lightning round question. In two sentences. Tell us about the time you were told to change your ways and how you reacted.

Or you could add the what's the dollar amount? What's the highest dollar amount item you've ever blown up at work? That's a good one. That's a kind of a combination of one. See, I think I got a pretty good total going. Although one of them came back to life. So I don't know if I got to count that one. No.

What was you? You annihilated, like, some servers or something, Chris? Oh, I blew up a server at mud. Fire. It lit on fire. That really wasn't my fault. No. I just, I was the person who turned it on.

And then it subsequently lit itself on fire moments later. It was a known defect. We got the insurance money. Blown up several lasers. And then there was the car that was recent, the vehicle. Oh, God, I still feel really bad about that. You didn't blow up the car. I did the opposite of blowing up a car.

I moistened the car. No, that doesn't sound good. That sounds like you just took like a spray bottle and like kind of misted it. It left it the sunroof open, just a crack. It was a client's test vehicle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of those, yeah.

But the better ones are the funny ones where, you know, and some of them were just. Like when the stage went too, too fast and crushed Barbie's head because, Barbie was there as a stopper for a little while while I was doing PID controlling. Sure. Yeah. And I was just present at some of the other ones, like the time that somebody fired the high-powered laser at their monitor.

Oh, okay. And it was forever left with a series of dots on there. I thought you were going to bring up the bomb range. The bomb range. That's a whole episode. Jeez. This would be a great spot for the TV to just, like, drop random. Like, oh, I don't even start. it on the Furby, you know, like no backstorages.

The bomb range with the snake bite kit and the FBI. Well, it was a separate one. The FBI was a separate one. The duct tape shoes because your shoes were melting. I think you're thinking of that episode of McGuiver again. No, no, this was all an adventure. Write this down. This will be a future episode we won't follow up on.

Companies did weird, weird stuff in the early odds. Different weird stuff from they're doing now. Different weird stuff. nobody ever needed a snake bite kit for AI so far what else do we have on the survey Chris we jumped out of you as you're going through it um let's see the ads uh blank my listening experience where you were saying the ads the question was the ads either detract from my listening experience have no effect on or enhance and have no effect on or enhance was more than 86%.

All right. We're taking that to the sponsors. So the ads are a good thing, I think, mostly. 14% said to interact from, but everyone else thought it was good. How did you find out about the show? I thought it was a couple things in there, like about half the people, either search for it or had it recommended or heard it from a host, the guest was on a different podcast. This is just a reminder to listeners that if you know other embedded folks in your life who

I like this podcast, then, you know, shared around the office, shared around the other community groups you're part of. And that's another way to spread some of this joy and some of this fun with other folks. So a little plug for plugging the show. Yeah, someone else mentioned kind of wishing that their coworkers also listen to it. But, you know, that's another great usage of it, that, you know, if you have co-workers that listen to it or that you can kind of get attached to the show, now you've got a common language in terms of the, hey, you remember that thing that was talked about last week?

this is where I should promise to send out stickers. I might. I think the last part was really the last question, which was, is there anything else you'd like to share with Alicia and Chris? Before we get into that, Nathan, anything else that jumped out of you? Because I think that might be a really good place to end. No, I think we'll end with that one. All right.

This is great. So of the 69 total people and the 68 who continued through the end, 57 people had responses for this last one. And I'm only saying that because this is 57 people. people who it sounds like from reading the comments here, like their lives are generally, genuinely better because of Chris and Alicia and doing the show for 10 plus years here. So I hope if you two are ever feeling down or like, why are we doing this, that you read through these, maybe you have like a random shell script that shows you one a day or something like that. But my favorite

quote of all was, you are America's funniest engineering couple. Yes. I don't know if I'm honored. I'm putting that on the website. That's going to be the poll quote at the top of the website. America's funniest engineering couple. I mean, if that doesn't make it into the award application, I don't know what you're doing, Alicia.

Very niche. Noted. Possibly two, maybe only three contestants. Yes. People say thank you. you for keeping it real. You guys are actually great. I really appreciate the work you both put into the podcast from both a professional and personal perspective. Thank you. Please keep it up. And both of you really resonate with me and my life experiences. I look forward to each and every

episode. Thank you for 500 excellent episodes. Audio production standards are very high. Thank you for that. That is all, Chris. I have imposter or I don't belong syndrome. Your podcast has been awesome to create a coherent community in this type of work. Thanks for help. me learn um yeah you've been the most valuable resource in my career thank you so much for everything you've shared uh keep up the good work i know you guys talk a lot of burnout and other issues but the podcast is really wonderful it's nice to hear about other people's experiences interesting projects articles book recommendations i don't know how much time is involved in producing the podcast but the weeks without it are duller wow well this is all very nice and that that's

as much as i can take of positivity all right we'll put an end to that Now, people do both, as someone who's been in the Slack community for years, like I think from there and reading these comments was not a surprise to me, but it was still very nice to read. I think people really do find value from the shows. I know I have in, you know, knowing you do, and certainly listening to all the episodes and learning all kinds of random and sometimes embedded things.

And the community that's part of the Slack group is also really good, like watching people struggle with stuff and learn stuff. and get jobs and help each other out and review resumes and do mock interviews and ask random questions about why my i squared c isn't working and someone suggests a pull up that it helps them and getting to see all that they're you know you you all you two have built um with a lot of effort um a really unique place on the internet i think that's actually like a healthy community um i hope i didn't just jinx it if i did it's my fault um you know just the show is great just the community is great and i think together together there there is really good so thank

you personally for doing this, and I'll stop being nice to you now, Chris. Well, I think, just to add to that, I think my favorite thing about the show or the thing that I'm most proud of is having that community, which mostly formed organically, exist and, you know, be kind of self-sustaining, and we don't actually do anything on the Slack except come in and chat like anyone else or jokes or be snorkey. Who would say, did the DMs to be a little nicer. Yeah, yeah. But for the most part, everybody's great.

As far as internet communities go, it's been really easy and good and useful to me too. Yeah, me too. I mean, I think we've found jobs sometimes through that or at least adjacently. Yeah, you know, and I think that did come up a couple of times. Svecki mentioned anything else in the survey, but I think lots of people mention the how wonderful and useful and awesome the Slack community's been. I'll second that. That's been probably the best professional decision of my career after Chris came to talk to Alex

Dean's class at NC State University. And I was like, oh, there's a school podcast and joined the Slack. It's just been a phenomenal group of people. Like you mentioned, Spec, you know, I've had so many questions answered by much more knowledgeable people who were extremely kind and patient and their explanations. And I've had the opportunity to share some stuff that I've learned with folks who hadn't quite learned that yet. So that's just been an awesome resource.

And it's been a great community. And, you know, if anyone's listening and they haven't done that yet, for like, what's it, like a dollar a month, you can be part of this awesome community. And I'll tell you what, I'll say this on air right now. If you, for whatever financial reason, cannot afford a dollar a month to be part of the Slack community, email me, Nathan Charles Jones at Gmail.com, and I will sponsor you. Okay, it's just, I mean, on top of having wonderful guests on the show, being part of that slack is just great. It's not even a dollar a month.

We never kick anybody. It's just a dollar. If you want ad-free shows, it's five bucks a month. But if you just want to be on the Slack. It should be on Slack. The dollar for the Slack was always intended as a... We want to know you're serious. We want to know you actually are real human with, you know, a dollar.

Do it. I'll sponsor you. One other thing that I'll say is that, especially in reading through the question about what's your biggest failure or learning opportunity last year, I noticed a number of people talking about, you know, struggling with things technical or, you know, hey, I'm a new manager and I'm, you know, like I'm doing very poor there. I forget the other things in there, but a bunch of things. And I want to encourage anyone, including myself, that if you're having issues, whether it's, interviewing or managing or some technical thing, go to the community and ask the question.

I know people frequently will, you know, the question will be like five words, and they'll put about 15 words around it that are, please forgive me for asking this beginner question that everyone else probably knows. So I would encourage us all to, like, get rid of the boilerplate stuff and just go in with the question because everyone, you know, everyone has questions, everyone has failures, everyone needs help in that community. It's been a pretty good place to get technical, you know, technical help, kind of work, professional help, all kinds of stuff. So I encourage people who listed failures and talked about learning opportunities and who are interested in learning more to ask for feedback, ask for help on the Slack.

And probably, probably someone will be willing to give you something that might be useful. Yeah. Yeah. And if they're mean to, you just message me and I'll take care of it for you. Every once in a while I'd like to, you know, get engaged. For the record, I've had no one be mean to be on Slack except for Sveck that one time. There was that one. It's okay.

It's okay. I deserved it. I was sorry. You deserved it. I am contractually obligated to be mean to Chris, but that's the core system. The core system knows why. And let's just be clear, I am married to Christopher White and not Chris Vec, who is married to someone else entire. And I don't think she appreciates the confusion.

The confusion. Actually, I was going to ask if at the beginning of the show, if we could just, Nathan, if we could just call you Chris to keep things simpler. Or we could call you Bruce as well to quote the old Monty Python sketch. Yes. Thank you, Nathan, for putting the survey together. Thank you both for looking through the responses and pulling out such nice ones. Thank you for talking to us on Christmas, New Year's Eve, New Year's Eve, Squared.

Yes. Very welcome. Thanks for the community. Thanks for the shows. You know, thanks for figuring out, hopefully what's a more workable schedule for you. And if you guys got to pull back more, then, you know, obviously we. I'm feeling quarterly. How are you?

Quarterly? Oh, man. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. That'd be painful. But, yeah, thanks for doing what you're doing. And for, yeah, just for everything. We appreciate you.

And we have some good shows coming up. We can't, you know, just go to that until we get through that. I was kidding. Thank you to our sponsors this year as well. Mouser, Run Safe, Nordic, and Memfault, and our supporters on coffee and Patreon. It's weird. We don't do this for the money, but the money tells us we're doing a good job, although the survey also says we're doing a good job.

So thank you to everyone who filled out the survey. I would like to have a huge shout out to Petria Cameron for doing our professional transcripts and to Rayne Novor for his work on social media for us as well as collecting links and other assorted help. Congratulations, Rainey on the new job. Finally, thank you for listening. If you'd like to contact us, show at Embedded.fm or hit the contact link on Embedded FM. and no quote. Just a big, we appreciate you. And happy New Year. Thanks, Nathan. Thanks, Chris. Thank you, all three of you. Thanks for having us.