Embedded - 527: At The Jellyfish Conference

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

Chris and Elecia talk about pushing out of their comfort zone, networking advice, adding STARs and action verbs to resumes, using rust, thermo forming plastics, soldering together audio gear, and winning awards.  If you are looking for an update to your resume or are interviewing for a new job and you haven't heard of the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result), it is a good way to formulate what you've done in a way that helps people see your impact. The Rutgers College Career Development Center has a STAR description that includes how to take your current, boring "did the task" resume bullet point and move it into STAR format and then into resume format to say "got great things done". There are lots of examples of STAR in practice (ex 1, ex 2). We mainly talked about resumes but it is very useful for having coherent stories during interviews. (Search "STAR resume", "STAR interview", "STAR engineering" to find a presentation that works for you. The college career sites are probably the best ones I've found.) On the topic of resumes, if you don't know about resume action verbs, let us share some lists that will make writing your resume 25% less painful. Again, college career development centers have the best ones (Harvard Business School's action verb list is good for managers, Penn State has a nice set of verbs for engineering or see University of Houston's verb list for engineering.) And on the topic of interviewing and networking, do you have an elevator pitch for yourself? A short introduction of who you are? It is really handy to have that for conferences as well. Princeton has a short write up on putting one together; UPenn has a long write up (ironic given the topic but still useful). Will Chris be adding the Rust language to his resume? Too early to tell. He's been learning with Rust for Embedded C Programmers - OpenTitan Documentation.  Elecia has been playing with origami molded fabrics, as learned on Instructable Paper Mold Origami Fabrics 3.  The term on Instagram seems to be #plissage and it is covered in (super famous origami guy) Paul Jackson's encyclopedic Complete Pleats.  Chris has built a Colour Duo 2-Channel Colour Channel Strip Kit (a preamp with modifiable analog processing). This kit is from DIY Recording Equipment. He's enjoying working with it while recording music.  After Elecia's New Year's Resolution to apply for awards, we won a Communicator Award for Individual Episodes-Science & Technology, Distinction 2026 for an episode about engineering the landscape of fear and conservation technology in the wild: 501: Inside the Armpit of a Giraffe. This was quite the honor but after some consideration, we are even more honored to be nominated by listeners for the IEEE Educational Activities Board (EAB) Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education. This award "recognizes IEEE members who volunteer their time and effort to improve the informal education community, helping to promote engineering to students, parents, and the general public." Having fulfilled the objective and gone beyond, Elecia is still planning to apply for the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards where we'll need to find one or two episodes from July 2025 to July 2026 that show off "scientific accuracy, initiative, originality, clarity of interpretation, and value in fostering a better public understanding of science and its impact." Transcript

Hello and welcome to Embedded. My name is Elysia White. I'm here with Christopher White, and this is going to be one of those shows where he and I just chat. Just you. That's much harder. All the dogs here. Last time, I had a podcast with a pet.

People got mad. Half our listeners got really mad. The other half are hilarious. To be fair, at the time we had eight listeners. Fair. By absolute numbers, it wasn't a big deal. That's true. Okay, so I have a list, I have a list, but I don't know where to start.

Okay, you see the list. I see the list. Where should I start? Do you want to order them by most technical to least technical? Do you want to order them by least technical to most technical? Do you want to randomly bounce around the list? Do you want to... Now I have two lists.

Remember, whenever you have a problem, throw a Molotov cocktail. And then you have a different problem. Exactly. Thank you for that. Well, there's one thing I didn't put here, and it's got an exclamation point, so I assume you're excited about working with Russ? No, I'm more acknowledging that people will be shocked and horrified or whatever after years of explaining that I'm hoping to retire before having to use Rust. But you recently got a Rust assignment. Well, the more accurate thing to say is I had no reason to use it, so I have to use it.

looking at it. And unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your perspective, I know have a reason to use it. So I am trying to very quickly learn enough rust to port something from what's basically desktop rust or whatever you want to call it to an embedded device. And it's a series of algorithms that someone has already ported from Python. So this is, and yeah, and I would like to know. have to convert that to C if at all possible and just have it run in native Rust, but there's things that need to be done to make it more embedded friendly. And the rest of your embedded system is in C. Yeah, it's Zephyr Project, NRF, SDK, standard stuff, all in C. So what are the first three things you like about Rust? That's a loaded question. You were sure I was going to ask,

what are the first three things you hate about West? Three things? I'd accept one. You know. So there's a lot of things in Rust that are very similar to Swift that I like. Swift, of course, is object-oriented, has a lot of inheritance and stuff. Rust is, as far as I can tell, not really that way. It's more like C. But there are kind of some nods to object-orientedness. So you can have structs that have functions associated with them, which basically feel like classes.

And you can have all that in one file. You don't need a header file. So you can have your implementation in your interface in the same place. It's kind of nice. The enumes are nice, and the way, which is very similar to Rust, enumes can be any type mixed within the enum. So you can have an enum that's not just a bunch of ints. It can be another struct. I think even a function, stuff like that.

Do they have good iterators? Like if you have an enum, can you say for each? Yeah, you can do that for most of the collections of things. That's something I find myself doing in Python that I really want to do and see. Well, Rust has vectors. So you can do lots of Python-like stuff with slicing and go from here to here. But it's all, you know, kind of for each thing in. So that's nice.

What was the other thing? Still get my head around the memory. I like the way Swift does it better, but Swift is object-oriented, so they have a little leg up on making that easier in Rust is... This is the Barrow-checker? Barrow-checker in lifetimes and stuff. It's kind of weird. There's a lot of very, as far as I can, I've been using Rust for a week.

Okay, so don't. This is initial, initial, sealings. Don't come at me, bro. So I don't even understand some of this stuff very well. But it feels to me like they got around a lot of the memory issues and with pointers and things by just being amazingly strict. Like, you can't do stuff. So pointer alias thing is way super locked down. If you, like, set a.

No cast to Void Star. No. If you sent like a pointer equal to another pointer, that original pointer is now gone. Not gone, but it's not alias anymore. You can't. Like if you do let A equal B or B is another pointer, you can't do anything to B. It's an error. I don't understand, but sure. Right. It's confusing. But it's protecting you from having a bunch of things pointing at something else. Oh, so I can't have two things, three things, ten things pointing at the same structure, and all of them can edit it.

Right, right. You can do immutable things so I can say let A is an immutable reference to B, and that's okay. But as soon as you make something mutable, like I'm going to changeable, then it gets really mad. Does it end up making copies of everything?

No. It changes the ownership. And so it wants to keep track of who the owner is, and if you've got 16 owners, it can't really do that very easily. If there's only one owner and it's guaranteed, then the exit of scope, it can free things. This is my rudimentary understanding.

So it'll make copies of tiny data types and some things like that. Those will be copied by default, but things that are structs or have pointers within them, like a struct with an associated data buffer, that will be something that's very strict about. So I haven't had to encounter that much because this is, again, just algorithms. When I'm dealing with one buffer, it's iterating through it, doing arithmetic.

It's very simple stuff. So that's interesting. Things I don't like about Rust, which you haven't mentioned. I cannot stand the syntax. I do not know what people were thinking. It's funny. I have started, at one time I had started using the language-based and an oars. And I really liked that.

in C, it would be like A and B, and instead of the ampersand or double ampersand for not bitwise, it would be just the word. And it is valid, and I loved that. And I was just like, why do we have so many symbols when three characters is just not that big a deal? Because in 1979, or whenever, or the 80s, terminals were very narrow and text, it was expensive. I mean, no, I'm not explaining to you, but it's like, we don't, my point is, we don't need to do that anymore. Yeah, and so I was surprised when you said that Rust was very symbolic. It's just some of the, it's, the Swift is similar in some ways.

There's just a lot of stuff when you're constructing functions and things. There's just, it's mostly like the function signatures and stuff. There's just a lot of, of keywords and not keywords, just symbology. and things that have to deal with return values and alias and types. And, yeah, it's, I'll get used to it. But I am looking for good suggestions on crash courses for C programmers who have used Swift. Do you have a cheat sheet? I have a cheat sheet.

Somebody at work did suggest a book that I'm looking through. What is the book? Do you know the name? I do not have my work slack in front of me, but it was from, it's not a book, it's a website. Hang on just a second. It's opentighten.org made it. It's some open source project that they're doing root of trust chips and stuff,

but they had a page, and I will find it and put it to the show notes. It's from opentighten.org. It's basically Rust for C developers. That is my very short experience with Rust. It's fine. that I can port as much of this wholesale without making a lot of changes because that would be a big win. Short story is these algorithms run on the back end of our product.

And I would like to move some of them to the device for various advantages. Moving from cloud to edge computing. Well, long story short, there's a lot of stuff to move over Bluetooth. And if I could move less stuff over Bluetooth, that would make... To reduce communication? A million people's lives. Improved battery life. Okay.

Several people's lives easier. But I don't want to maintain it in both places. If there's minimal changes I can make, if somebody makes a change to the algorithm, I can just bring that over. We'll see. It's definitely a exploratory project. But I was handed Rust, and I had no option between porting the Python or trying to port the Rust.

And since Rust can be compiled and called from C, easier than Python on an NRF 52, 840. Yeah. Are you going to put it on your resume? Resumé. It was the next thing on the list. So this is my attempt at a smooth transition. I see.

Are you ready for it? This is the smooth transition between topics. Sure. I would put it on my resume as soon as I feel marginally competent with it. And assuming I was ever looking for another job that required me to send a resume. Resumies. I did a resume review for a relatively senior engineer, and I was a little surprised I felt like either they hadn't heard the latest techniques or, I don't know, I'm going to go with that. Techniques or things you need to do to be seen by robots?

Not the robots. I mean, the search engine optimization and the robot feeding is definitely a separate thing. I don't know that I'm good at that, so I couldn't possibly give advice about it. But my advice did have a lot to do with action verbs on your resume. Okay. You know about that, right? I guess at some level, it sounds right. Look, I took a whole clap.

My last class in grad school was resume writing, but that was 2009. So I'm sure things have changed since then. Don't ask me why I had to take that class. It was required for all graduate students of any subject. And I left it to the end because the time I thought maybe it would go away and I wouldn't have to do it. So action verbs. Okay. So when you're writing a resume, you're writing it from your memory, you're like, I did this.

Yeah. And then you realize, okay, well, people don't say I. So you say, wrote driver for XB. You sort of weirdly passive voices where you're active, but you're not involved anymore. Right. Things got done. Yeah.

And because it's on your resume, you must have done them. Yes. But there's no, but there are lists provided by CMU and MIT and all of the big engineering universities. And they're online. And it's like search action verb engineering, and you'll find several of them. And instead of saying I made the data do things, you can go with analyzed data for demystifying robotic movements. Uh-huh.

Your goal here is to make it sound like you did cool things. Right. Even though you know you did cool things, even though I may be able to figure out you did cool things because of the way you talk about them, you want them to make it through the business person filter. Okay. So be cool. So be cool. And don't, okay, I know a lot of people are having their AI people, AI chat bots, write your resume. I'm not going to suggest that's a good idea. I will say it's not a bad place to get it checked for, grammar or inconsistencies or typos because those just kill resumes. Write your own resume, but use action verbs. And it will help you. It will help you remember what you did.

Like, is there any time when I dissuaded somebody? I'm looking at CMUs and they have leadership skills, communication skills, technical skills and teaching skills, even financial skills. And so all of these have verbs that are associated with them. I mean, did I in fact allocate anything? Well, I allocated resources to work on a schedule at least once or twice. I allocated memory all the time. Remodeled source code instead of refactored because remodeled...

No, I don't know what I used that. I took the bathroom out. I replaced the toilet. No, remodeled doesn't work. pioneered a plan to do blah blah blah evangelized inspired implemented improved these are all better than lead which is just a kind of a not enough description work so if you are working on your resume look up action verbs they will help you so much it's just i don't understand how you got here without knowing about them.

Got where? Well, yeah. To the show. To the show. I'll put a couple in the list, in the show notes, but whatever your career is, if you want to do marketing, if you want to do managerial tasks, look up action verb and that so that you get a nice list of words that will make you think about your job from a more erudite.

Wow. From a more wordy, but a descriptive manner. Okay. And it'll make you sound cool. You want to take the vector of words that makes up your resume, cause it to shift the point of your resume

in that space of word vectors to a different outside the origin that people cluster around. Part of it's not. sounding like other people, but actually part of it is sounding like more professional people. But don't sound like an LLM because 99% of resumes probably sound like an LLM. So good luck with that. Yeah, that's a hard problem.

It is a little weird to give resume advice when I'm not actively hiring, so I don't know what's out there. And yet, the other piece of advice I had for resumes and for interviews is the Star Method. it. Okay. I have never heard of that. Um, okay, so Star stands for situation, task, action, results. Situation, task, action result, okay? The idea is instead of passively describing what you did, instead of saying, I led the team in completing PRs. I get it. You start with the sitch. You start with the sitch. Here's what was going down. Uh, companies, was not doing PRs because they decided. Didn't know what one was.

They didn't know what one was. So then you, situation, and then you have the task, state what you were responsible for doing or the problem that really needed solving. I love this. This goes back to the action words. You're right. You did something. You have a task. What were you really responsible?

What was the kernel of the task? And then the next step, A, for action, is the specific steps you took. And this really needs to start with those action verbs. And then finally is the result, which is the positive outcome. Ideally, with a number or some way to quantify the impact, which is so impossibly hard in engineering. I got five fewer insults a day from people in nearby kids. Cubemates. I used to have a member, I may still have in my resume, I don't know, I haven't seen it

well, about solving a DC motor puppetry problem. That's not where I thought that sense was going. With a 25 cents PID system. And even when that was like on the second page of my resume, everyone would ask about it. because it was just, if you knew about motors, it was impossible. If you didn't know about motors, the puppetry aspect was so amusing. One of the things you're doing with your resume is you're trying to get people to ask you the questions you want to be asked. You're trying to set them up.

You're trying to give them a way to give you the slow pitches so that you can just hit this out of the park because you already know what the question's going to be and you have a great answer for it. The STAR method, even if you don't end up putting all of those things on your resume, or on your performance review, or on wherever you're doing this, if you can memorize this situation,

task, action results, it gives you a way to tell a story about what you did. So one of the reasons I like this is the kinds of questions that I personally do best with is when an interviewer asks, tell me about a time you had a difficult, tell me about a challenge you overcame, or tell me about a difficult problem in how you solved it or something like that, which sets up this, like you naturally would answer using the Star Method a question like that.

But thinking about the Star Method means you can answer questions that are not phrased that way. in that way, which makes it sound better like you are, here's a challenge. Like, I don't know, what would somebody ask that wasn't really, what's one of your biggest technical challenges you overcame or something, but you could use the start method on? What did you, what were the difficulties associated with using rust in this project? Right, yeah. Or what were the benefits of using rust in this project? And now you're like, okay, the situation was, company wanted to use Rust because it existed.

That's kind of a boring story. but it is a situation. It's a start to the answer. Or that and then also questions that are very vague, like tell me about your role at X. Yes. Pick a challenge. Well, we had the following, you know, I was a developer and I was responsible for the following things. Some of the, one of the big challenges we had was blah.

For example. When I came in, when I came into the company, this was the situation. Here were the things I did to improve things, you know, stuff like that. When I came into the company, they had no version control. Happens more often than you'd like. I was responsible for FAA certification, and I felt like that was not going to work. I implemented... Especially since it was for something that wasn't for airplanes.

I'm joking. Oh, sorry. I had FAA certify a leapfrog toy. No, kidding. But then, you know, if I get to the result of it is an FTAA product now, Yeah. That's impressive. That is just, that tells the story of we went from no version control to FAA certified. And I can leave out a whole bunch of things because if I managed that much, there must be a whole bunch more.

So, yes, the Star Method, if you aren't familiar with it, it's a great way to work on your resume. It's a great way to practice interviewing. Like I said, it's even good for when you are doing your self-review for performance reviews. should you be so lucky as to have those. I will link to it. There are a whole bunch of different people talking about it, people giving examples on how to do it. It's a good process to have because it is a good storytelling process,

and it leaves you a way to anticipate questions, as well as to draw questions, which I think is more important. Okay, so that was my resume advice. Was there anything else under that? No. Okay. Now you need to find a clever segue into whatever we're going to talk about next. We went to our 30th.

Oh, my God, 30. 30 month college reunion. Sure. Go with that. It's hard to believe it's that. So for those of you who think that we're like 20, I'm sorry. I don't think anybody thinks we're 20. I kind of wish.

Sometimes I act like I'm 20. but then my knees remind me that even when I was 20 I had crappy knees. Anyway, we went to our college week. Did you have fun? I did have fun. I was also exhausted at the end of it. But yeah, it was nice to see some people I don't think we've seen since college. Since college, right.

Some people we hadn't seen in a decade or two. It was interesting to see the school and how much it had changed and how parts hadn't changed. It's very strange to see the mix of vast changes and stuff that has not changed. Like the dorms look exactly the same.

They have the same character, the same individual dorm personality. They had the same, not the same signs, but the same signs reflecting their character. Let's put it that way outside. Same kind of West still clearly lights everything on fire.

Same sort of as spriticure and decor. So, yeah. But there was more, you know, there was weird stuff. Like it felt like there was as much drinking in evidence as I remembered, and I thought that had gotten better in colleges. But maybe I was just, I was noticing it more. It was the last day of classes. Yeah.

The facility is way better. So much better. Lots of new buildings with, you know, they have a gigantic maker space, much better classrooms and offices and things. Remember, this is Harvey Mide. It was a very small school when we went. I think there were 600 people total in the student body when we went. I think that's right. I think it might be up to 900 or something like that.

But it's not, it's expanded some, but it's not like a giant school. It also wasn't the most expensive school in the United States when we went there. Yeah, and it's pretty close now. But when we went, the facilities were definitely in transition. We had a couple new buildings happen while we were there. A new dorm or two, at least one new dorm. And the new sciences building. But that was pretty much it.

And since then they have a computer science building, a giant gym and activity center, another big, the math built, right? The Shanahan, is that the math building? Yeah, it's the math building. Two new dorms beyond the ones that we had. Yeah, so it's expanded quite a bit and things look modern. Oh, and the new dining hall, which doesn't suck. Sorry, we're still bitter about that. They have 905 as of 20.

50%. So they expanded by 50%. So they expanded quite a lot. The ratio of gender ratio is now no longer five male to one female. And now it's like 50-50. I think it's more women identifying than male. So that's 51-49 or something like that. But anyway, not important.

I mean, it's important, but it's not the exact. figure doesn't matter. Yeah, so we were definitely in a transition where the college was getting old while we were there, like, not old, but the facilities that it originally built had started straining. Definitely. The, in many of the departments, the original kind of set of professors from the 60s and 70s were on the verge of retiring or retiring while we were there. Yes. So the faculty mix was. The math and engineering and faculty were. elderly. Yeah, a lot of new math people came in while we were there and then continued. So there were very few professors at our reunion that we recognized, only one or two,

because most had retired at that point. The people who were there were the new professors while we were there. But yeah, it was good. It was a lot of socialization for people who don't socialize a lot. A lot of loud kind of group events, people shouting, because everyone was talking, that kind of thing. But yeah, it was worthwhile. What did you think?

I thought it was good. I thought it was interesting that I really am averse to crowds now. Before like 2020, before the pandemic, I didn't like crowds. But I wasn't, I need to leave. now, didn't like crowds. Now I'm a little more aware that when I get overwhelmed, I get really unhappy. And so I'm more willing to say, I don't want to be unhappy.

There's no reason for me to be doing this. I'm going to go over there. Yeah. So you ended up missing things because I was. Missing what? Willie, I wanted to be on the edges of everything. I think you're discounting how much I also have trouble with crowds. But, yeah.

I mean, it's kind of embarrassing when you're like sitting outside and... Yeah, but it's 100 decibels and everybody's shouting. And people come over and hang out with you. And then like you get to this level. And even though everybody came out over to our table, we were the first to leave. Yeah, but then people would come over to a quiet area. It was fine. You know, everybody, like you said, we're not 20.

Everybody there is our age or older, well, except for the younger reunion people, but the people we were hanging out with are our age or older. And, you know, everybody gets peculiar and has the things that bother them more that they get older. So I think that's nobody's judging anybody for that. One of the things that I heard from a woman who didn't go to Harvey Mudd College, but who is a close friend and was there, her husband went to Harvey Mudd. She is an MIT Sloan graduate, so she's an MBA. And she said something, I think she said it in passing. And then I was like, what?

Do you remember? So Jane said that Harvey Mudd must not have the MBA tagline, I don't know, commandment. Ethos. Ethos to always be attractive. Oh, okay. Do you remember? No, I missed that. Okay.

So I was kind of boggled by this. I think we were talking about, you know, what people were wearing into the party the night before because one person was dressed very nicely and the rest of us were... And that person was not a mud student. He was the husband of somebody in our class. Exactly. And, I mean, I had a dress on.

I even had heels on. I looked cute. But I didn't... I wasn't... If you'd pushed me in the pool, I wouldn't have cared. I think you would have cared. I would have cared, yes, but I wouldn't have worried about my dress. Anyway, so Jane says that there's this idea in business school about always being attractive.

And for some reason, that just really struck me as not something I have ever thought about. I thought business school was always be closing. I thought so, too. But as I was thinking more about it, it wasn't necessarily always be pretty. I mean, because all of the mutters were hygienic. Well, let's not come that far. Oh, at the reunion. At the reunion.

I remember college just fine, thanks. But, you know, everybody was presentable and everybody was wearing nice-ish clothes. Yeah. But nobody was... intentionally being attractive. They were being... Normal? Normal.

Okay. And then after Jane said that, I started looking for that in some of the other people, not really in the mudders, because I knew what to expect there, but in some of the spouses. And I realized that she didn't just mean I always be pretty. Yeah. She meant always be attractive, which isn't the same. same is pretty. Attractive is open. Make people want to talk to you.

Yeah. And even that level of attractive is something that I'm like, no. Why would I want that? Why would I want that? I see. I see. But you do want that sometimes. I want it sometimes, sure. But for the most part, I'm like, oh no, talk to the hand way far away. In fact, don't even get close enough to talk to the hand. I don't

She says to 6,000 people I know I don't usually want to be attractive and it was weird to hear that as advice. You don't want to be noticed I don't want to occasionally I want to stand out

but when I don't actively want to stand out I don't want to be noticed Yeah, okay I understand then, okay, so I had this conversation and it made me think a lot about various things. It kind of was one of those, huh, other people do that? Sort of, you're looking like I'm crazy. Like, don't you have those times when you're like, people do that? No.

I mean, I know people are different. What is an extrovert to you, if not somebody who, wants people to talk to them. People who want to go to loud places and have people talk around to them. Okay. I don't think that's accurate. People who get energy from being around other people. But why do you think that is? I didn't think it had any.

There's so much I don't know. You can't be around other people if you're unattractive. By your definition of attractive. If you are pushing people away, as an extrovert that makes extroversion difficult. It's very difficult to be an extrovert in a vacuum. We can still be a round of... Copyright, Christopher White, 2026.

People. Okay, okay. Okay, well, ramifications I did not. I think you should read less murder bot. Did you like the new murder bot? I enjoyed the new murder bot. But she didn't love it. I did not love it.

It was good. It was in the, I'm not going to put down a murder bot book and turn it away. But I felt like it was half of a story. Yeah, I felt like I wanted more. It definitely wanted more. It's definitely worth reading. I mean, even if there's no story, just reading through murder bots thought processes and how they are dealing with the situations that keep being thrown at them,

is amusing. So on that level, it was great. I felt like the plot was kind of a escort mission in an RPG with not a lot of substance. I thought the end payoff was good, but I wanted more and murder-bought, while the star of the show still didn't play quite enough of a role

I mean, it didn't really grow. It felt a little bit on rails. Yeah. Like, there weren't a lot of choices that they could make. Yeah. So, yeah. But it was good story. It was good.

It wasn't super long. It would have been hard to drop into if you didn't remember all of it. Definitely. Definitely. And I had trouble. I had trouble, even having read all the books, I kept asking you, who is this person? And what happened before? That was a bit tough.

But it was a murder bot. But it's like, I don't know, what is it, the eighth or ninth book in the series? So that's going to happen. You can't drop into a book series that long and expect to remember everything. Not that long and detailed. Two things about the reunion before we move on that I thought were interesting was, well, interesting. Things that I noticed. Smart kids are still smart.

I was worried that there was going to be evidence of brain rod or something from the kids we interacted with from, you know, too much chatbot use or whatever, but they had posters up and they explained them well and they weren't, weren't all about chatbots or machine learning. Having said that, walking through the CS department, every single poster in the entire CS department was about large language models, all of them. There is no work being done in CS, as far as I can tell from this evidence of one college, CS department, that is not focused on large language models, which I think might be a mistake. And we were walking around and there was a professor talking to an alum and they were talking about Transformers in L&LLLLLLLLM. So yeah, big hype. Perhaps there is something else out there

to research, but not right now. Anyway. So the always be attractive thing came up again for me as I was giving somebody networking advice. They were going to a conference and were worried about being awkward. Do you have any advice for networking? I mean, there is get a podcast to become very accustomed to interviewing people. And then basically, if you are in a networking situation, just interview people because at least now you're good at that.

That's the thing is don't, this is true of talking to anyone in a date situation or networking or anything where you're... First contact. Right. First contact. An alien. Right. Don't make it all about you. Ask people what they're interested in, what they do, ask follow-up questions and try to let the conversation. And it goes back to they always be attractive thing. I really don't like the attractive part that has too much weight that doesn't mean what it means. But most people like talking about themselves or things they've done that they're proud of.

And most people do not like being talked at or being lectured or hearing just about somebody else's stuff without an invite. So I think that's a general good advice is get interested in somebody else and let them lead the conversation so that you can start talking about yourself in a natural way. I think people like to feel like somebody's interested in them. And so if you establish a good rapport with somebody who you've just met, then you created a better link for networking than if you're just going around and saying, well, here's, I'm going to read my resume from memory to you. Do you like me? Yes. Is that the kind of thing you were thinking about?

Well, it's part of it. For people who haven't been networking or who are out of the habit of it or are new college folks, the first thing you need to do. Find the places. I wouldn't think so. Okay. There's a thing called an elevator pitch. Oh, right, yeah.

And I-Triple-E teaches this. I assume other places do as well. But the idea for an elevator pitch for a startup is you have 90 seconds in an elevator with a venture capitalist. How are you going to explain your product? Sorry, I was just having, I was thinking about that Captain America scene where he's in the elevator with all the people who were trying to kill him. And that's all I could think about with 90 seconds in an elevator with a venture capitalist. But please, do go on. Okay.

The idea is that instead of a product, what you're doing is pitching yourself. So 30 to 90 seconds of summarizing you. For me, hi, I'm Elysia White. I write embedded software, which is software for things that aren't computers. That was seven seconds. I sometimes will add in podcast, author, whatever. For most people, if they are not in the embedded space, the next question is, what is software for things that aren't computers? And it goes back to invite the question you want.

but you going to a conference should have this. And it may be conference specific. If you're going to a jellyfish conference, you may not want to talk about your embedded security. Sorry, there was a jellyfish concert. I really consider a conference. I really considered signing up. It isn't far, but I have no reason to go.

But it is about jellyfish. So I'm torn. Anyway, I wouldn't introduce my. myself that way. At the jellyfish conference. But at a hardware security conference, I might lean into being a host of the podcast where we talk about security and other things. So elevator pitches are practiced. You're not coming up with this on your own right at the second. You're thinking about it ahead of time. You're saying it two or three times, maybe even seven times. You want to really memorize it and you're thinking about where your hands are and what your face is doing the whole

time. Okay. So now you've memorized this speech, but you're not giving it as a memorized speech, or you're trying to make it seem natural. And while you are doing this, you have this 30 to 90 seconds to figure out what you're going to ask them. So when somebody says, tell me about yourself, you give your elevator speech and you start thinking about what you're going to ask them. Now, if this sounds like the very start of our shows, there's a reason for that. So you do your elevator pitch. The other thing is it's okay to have canned questions. You don't have to come up with what you're going to ask at the moment. You can, you're going to a conference about jellyfish, write down your top ten questions about jellyfish. You're going to a

conference about security, write down your top ten questions about security. You don't necessarily want to, you know, rapid fire them. But the things that you might want at either conference is, have you gone to any really good talks? What was your favorite talk? What are you looking forward to going to? You find somebody with speaker badge. What are you going to talk about?

Those are all things to have ready so that you don't have to sit down to lunch with someone and then go, crap, what am I supposed to say? Do I know this person? It's okay if you know them or not. They don't remember if you know them or not. You don't remember if you know them or not. It's all fine. You just say, have we met before? You look familiar. And if they say, I don't think so, or they say, I think so, but I don't remember your name, it's all good. Now, if they say yes, and we were best friends in high school, then you can feel embarrassed. But anything other than that,

you just accept that everybody's at a conference. There's a lot of names and faces going by. So can questions elevator pitches and then possibly for my own enjoyment, find the outliers, find the people who are on the edges who can't stand the noise. I like to believe the wallflowers are interesting. Hey, there was the crochet table right next to us at the quiet tent where the current college students were crocheting while I was crocheting. It was pretty cute. And they had big yarn, which made you want big yarn. Yeah, big yarn.

Got to do some more crocheting. So, okay, so resume advice, networking advice. Ooh, awards or plastics? Plastics. Plastics? Plastics. Oh, right. Plastics.

Projects. You have been doing something new with your origami, which involves plastics. Right. And heat. So I make an origami mold. What is an origami mold? So I make a pattern, like the curvy patterns that I like. And then I make two of them that are as precisely the same as I can make them.

Okay. Now, since I use a computer to generate the pattern and to score it onto paper... You can be reproducible. It's pretty reproducible. So you take these... I take these and then I put them in the form I want because usually what I want to do is kind of crush them so that the curves are interesting.

And then I spread them out again, which is something really I kind of cringe doing because you make it all the way you want it to and then you destroy that. Then I put some organza fabric, synthetic fabric, thin. Polyester. Polyester. but the organza means it's very light and looks like silk and you can see through it.

It's translucent. And the cheap stuff I have is rainbow translucent. So that's kind of cool. So I have my piece of paper and I have it like clamped onto something that keeps it straight now, flat. Okay. And put the organza down. I add the clamps to the organza. So now the organza is flat.

onto the paper. I put the other piece of paper on top of that and clamp all three together. So I have paper or ganza paper. Okay. And now I make a paper go back to the curvy pattern. Okay. So you've crushed it back down.

So I've crushed it back down and I've highlighted, I've creased all the creases again, which is easy this time because they're all ready to go. And now I tied up with fabric or wire or whatever. and chuck it in an oven. Chuck it in an oven. I'm using the garage oven, which is used for soldering stuff,

although it is too small. So now I'm thinking about getting a larger oven for the garage. I thought you figured out that a heat gun worked better. The heat gun doesn't work better. Oh, okay. I have decided the heat gun ones, they did not hold. So you put it in the oven for like 10 or 20 minutes, like 250 degrees, maybe 3.000.

350 degrees. I haven't really quite figured out what exactly. It depends on the fabric. It depends on the pattern. But the goal is not to burn things, which I did once. And then you let it cool down, totally let it cool down. That part is very important. And so like the next day, open it up, and now the fabric holds the pattern.

So this fabric that is super light and very air. and very wobbly. Now, after you pull it, pull it straight or put it in the wind, we'll jump back like a spring to the wavy pattern that I put in. This is called plisage, which is French for pleading. And it's something they do with expensive fabrics. But sometimes they do it with steam instead of heat for natural fabric. Oh, oh.

But a lot of people do it with the synthetic fabrics, because synthetic fabrics then can hold it as long as you don't, like, put it in the dryer. Okay. Interesting. And this is thermoforming plastics. Yes. I didn't. Thermoforming plastic sounds so engineering.

Well, I mean, yes. But origami molding organza sounds so crafty. So, yeah, and so I did that a few times. I had a really good time with it. And then I tried using the heat gun. And then I kept getting bigger and bigger ideas until it became clear that I couldn't actually implement the ideas in my head because it just required more and more stuff. Anyway, I'm working on it. It's fun.

It's weird. It means that all the weird patterns I make with origami. origami as long as I'm willing to do two of them, I can then make something else that's weird and cool, but I don't know what I'd do with it. You don't know what you do. I mean, there's clothing applications? Yeah, I started to make myself a really fancy weird scarf, but then I realized I would never wear it. Then I started to make you a fancy weird scarf, then I realized you would never wear it. Really, the only person in this house who would wear that scarf is the dog. And she has already wandered around with some of it in her tail, so.

Not intentionally. Do you have any fun projects? I just finished putting a kit together that I'm having fun with. It's kind of hard to explain, but it's a piece of audio gear. Without going into a great deal of detail, analog audio gear for recording imparts different kinds of character to things you're recording. If you record things perfectly, straight from a clean pre-amp from the microphone

straight to digital, it tends to sound pretty dead. Then people notice that, and they don't know what's wrong. This is why things... There was a whole thing about digital sounding cold in the 80s and things like that as part of it, but not the whole story,

but a lot of what makes recorded music sound good are a lot of subtle things, subtle harmonics and distortions and saturation. that happen naturally going through a lot of circuitry that is between the microphone and whatever you're recording on. This is not the environment. This isn't like recording in a church gives you nice echoes. This is about the recording gear.

This is about the recording gear. And so there's various things. There's transformers that were traditionally on preamps. There's tubes, which everybody knows kind of imparts. Sound warm. I don't know what that means. But I've heard that it sounds very warm. what it means is harmonics.

Basically, if you are recording a very perfect tone, from a bass guitar, base guitar is straight out of the bass guitar. It tends to have a very pretty pure tone. But as you add harmonics, which are frequencies that are multiples of the main note you're playing, things get more interesting and it feels warmer. It sounds more full.

It sounds softer. and so there's a lot of things like that without going into great detail. So I have some equipment that does things like that. I have some preamps that have transformers in them. The preamps we used to use for the podcast had transformers in them. Is it like guitar pedals? Not exactly. I mean, yes, similar, but guitar pedals are a much broader category of things that includes

digital and echoes and other stuff like that. Anyway, I got a kit for, I've been getting, more analog preamps so I can record acoustic drums because I've been doing some more acoustic drums instead of electronic drums for the record we're working on, which is very difficult. It's not that much more different. It's not that much different to play, but recording acoustic drums is a major pain in the butt. But I've kind of got it dialed in, and I'm happy with where I'm at. But drums in particular really benefit from going through a lot of character-inducing gear. Drums straight off the mics,

even in a good room, even with a good player, generally sound kind of flat. Thwappy? Not thwappy, just there's something missing, body. So there's often a lot of compression on drums, which is an analog procedure usually, but can be simulated in digital. And some EQ and other things that generate character. Because drums are very complex and percussive sound. So when you push things, push a little.

electronics hard with loud sounds. Interesting things happen that sound kind of cool. Anyway, so I have wanted some gear to impart some character deliberately beyond just the analog preamps I have that can do some different things. And I was doing some research, and there's a lot of options out there. There's something called 500 series lunch boxes, which are these kind of little racks that you can build or buy modules that go in, and they're, I don't know, about five inches by five inches,

and they're a complete piece of equipment. So you can get your lunchbox. It's basically this desktop rack and make or buy a bunch of modules and have an analog signal chain that you customize that's got these blades that go in. They're kind of expensive. You have to buy the lunchbox, power supply, and all that stuff.

I didn't really want to go that route. But I found this other company that does make 500 series stuff, but they also make standalone rack-mount units, and it's called Do It Yourself Recording Engineering, D-I-Y-R-E. And they make a lot of products from compressors to pre-amps and other things.

But they also have this format they've developed called the color format, spelled like the British, even though it's a company from Pennsylvania with the EU. And it's a pre-amp that's very clean, but it has little tiny modules that are about the size of an Arduino

maybe a little bigger than an Arduino, adeno dev board kind of thing. And those have just the minimum set of electronics to do something characterful. So one I have has a transformer and a discrete op-amp, and you can

push that hard with signal. That does transformers saturation. Another one I have is a little mostly surface amount, very tightly packed simulation of an analog

simulation of a very famous compressor called the 1176 from Universal Audio. And that's very cool and fits on a module. And another one I have is just a few transistors and resistors, and it kind of simulates the sound of recording to tape. So it saturates very softly as you push it hard, which is what tape does, which is a desirable thing. And, but these little modules just pop in and out.

So I've got this one-U rack-mount thing. You can slide it out, and it's got the carriers for each of these modules, and they just have an eight-pin connector and they snap right out and you can put a different one and you can edit your signal chain however you want. But they sell tons of kits for different little modules like this.

And they sell the proto boards and everything's open source. They have the schematics for all of this and a guide for how to build your own modules. So I also bought a couple of bare proto boards from them and I'm looking for circuits that might be fun to build to do myself and put in this preempt.

So that's what I did. It was a very, very big soldering project, hundreds and hundreds of parts that I didn't do a great job with. I think I'm better at soldering at the end of it. I've done a lot of soldering, but I've never quite gotten great at it. So I think I'm a little better after doing this. I mean, part of it's because you solder a largest project like once, maybe twice a year. Yeah. It's hard to retain skills on that. Yeah. And, you know, there's always a thing where you make one big mistake.

And I made one big mistake building it, which was there's a daughter board. and it has, I don't know, a 2 by 18 connector between it and the main board. Just pins, you know, the header. And I put it on the wrong side of the daughter ports, both of them. And there were three on each daughter board. It's a lot of pins, too. It was a lot of unsoddering. And I tried our desoldering gun from HACO, and it didn't work great.

Like, it got most of it off, but it was still enough, there's still enough contact with solder that it was. those weren't coming off without tearing the pads. And our hack-o-soddering, desoldering is having a problem. So I eventually learned how to properly use solder wick, which was actually what worked. So I got them off. But I had to very carefully clip them down.

I was a pain, and I did damage some of the pads, but ended up not mattering. So, yeah. But worked the first time. I didn't have to, I didn't make any mistakes in assembly, such that something was not working. So I was pretty happy with that. It was fun.

And you actually used it yesterday? Yeah, I used it on bass. I'm working on the bass part for the song, and I routed the bass from my bass preamp through that and dialed up some of the stuff. And it sounds pretty cool. So I'm probably using a bit too much because it sounds cool. Wow, look at that.

And it's, yeah, I need to get used to it. Why can't you just do this in software with like a Euro rack? Well, first a Euro rack is a different thing. That's a music creation tool. A Euro rack is that big modular synthesizer, which is also fully analog. Well, it is except you can have digital ones. Yeah, but most people do analog with it. It's got patches and stuff.

You mean in software with plugins in the software? Yes. Why can't you just do this in software? Yes. You can, but two things. It's very, very hard to record with that stuff in software, because software has latency. You can't get away from latency, even with the best simulation of whatever, it's going to be a few milliseconds, 10 milliseconds, whatever. And if you're listening to that and your original signal at the same time, it doesn't work. So if you want to record and print with any of this stuff, you can't. basically without very expensive stuff that may or may not do what you want. So that's one thing. If you want it on the actual signal path, you can't. Second thing is, I do think it sounds better when it's real,

because there's that wabi-sobby stuff where things change a little bit. Digital doesn't do that. You record through this a couple of times, and maybe in the course of a track, the temperature changes a little bit and things get a little, different. That does not happen in a digital plugin unless somebody adds in, you know, heat-related effects. And I do think there's limitations to what analog, but I do use a lot of digital plugins too. It's impossible to buy enough of this stuff for the number of tracks you need. So,

yeah, you're always throwing things that are analog simulations on. But it's also nice to have physical knobs. Oh, yeah. It just, it's really hard to, the thing about plugins is they all, look like the original equipment. So if I have several 1176 plugins, which is the compressor I was talking about. And they all look like an 1176 with the same knobs. And you have to grab the knob and turn it with your mouse. It's stupid. And I understand what they're going for. They want you to be able to take any setting you had on a real asset 1176 and put it on. But it's just clunky. And it's weird. But just grabbing a knob and turning it is still much more satisfying. And it's fun. I mean, It's more prone to be putting your signal through a board that you built than something you bought on sale for $20 from somebody's website.

I don't know. Are you going to put any? No, because we would be using it now if you were going to do it. No, there's no need for that for this. But what if I wanted to sound like I was on tape? I can put you through a tape sim. But then it won't get warm. You're already through a simulator of any analog compressor.

Oh, good. I've always wanted to be compressed. Well, you do want to be compressed. Someday we should talk about your chain for us. Chain for us has gotten very simple. Don't blame me. Devested my music gear from the podcast gear. Do we sound different? Not really, not much.

A little bit, probably. I don't know that anybody's noticed, but we're not going through the expensive mic preamp anymore. All right, so I only have one more thing. Okay. I wanted to have an award for the show, this show, that you're listening to, that you're talking to. And so I made a New Year's resolution that I would apply for an award every month until I got one. Okay.

And I did. That's right. We got a communicator award, which is to recognize excellence, effective. effectiveness and innovation across all areas of communication. And it is about setting the standard for impactful communication and blah, blah, blah. Okay. And we won it for the giraffe episode. Of course, which was a great episode.

It was a great episode. This was where Akiba and Meredith talked about. the landscape of fear, and I put it in the science category. So it's individual episodes, science and technology, distinction for 2026, which is second place, which is still really good. So, yeah, it was cool. And now I've won an award, and we are an award-winning podcast. Congratulations. Do you feel different? We were also nominated for the ICCI Educational Activities Board Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education. Wow.

That's going to look great on a trophy. That's a trophy. Folks who volunteer their time and effort to improve the informal education community helping to promote engineering to students, parents, and the general public. This one was harder where the Communication Award is. is one of many awards where you pay your hundreds of dollars and then you probably get an award unless you totally suck. I shouldn't say it because I did apply to other awards which we didn't get. So anyway, the IAA Award, we had to be nominated, which Mark did after I kind of gave up on the process because it was too hard.

and then we had to be endorsed by I-Triple E members, which several folks did. And so thinking about it, I think I don't care if I win. I truly am honored to be nominated. And it was both Chris and me, but Chris doesn't care as much. And because a lot of people put time and effort into telling folks that the show was good. and I know that those people often put in some time and effort to telling other people the show is good, and I really appreciate that. It's amazing to me that you listen. It's even more amazing to me that you're willing to tell other people that you listen.

So I'm not going to continue to apply for awards except for one in August, which is the AAS Cavalry Science Journalism Award. which is one that is juried and not super expensive and not a popularity contest. This one is actually pretty cool. It would be nice if we even ranked at all on that one. But I have fulfilled my goal of getting an award, and I have fulfilled my goal of feeling like people like us. So that's it. I'm done. All right.

I mean, I'm not done with the show. Oh. You done with this show? Yes, let's be done with this show. Okay. Thank you for listening. Thank you to the folks who nominated and endorsed us for the I-Triple-EA-B Award. Thank you to our Patreon supporters.

We do appreciate your funding primarily because it means you really like us. Also the coffee supporters, which you're not second class. Thank you to the Embedded FM Slack for their community and amusement value. And thank Christopher for producing and co-hosting and all the other things he does. And now there will be some Winnie the Pooh. I seem to call us very exciting last time. Oh, right, right. everyone's going on an expedition with Christopher Robin. Poo is wandering around collecting everybody.

He left Rabbit and hurried down to Piglet's house. The piglet was sitting on the ground at the door of his house, blowing happily at a dandelion, and wondering whether it would be this year, next year, sometime, or never. He had just discovered it would be never, and was trying to remember what it was, and hoping it wasn't anything nice when Pooh came up. "'Oh, Piglet,' said Pooh excitedly. "'We're going on an expedition. "'All of us with things to eat. "'To discover something?'

"'To discover what?' said Piglet anxiously. "'Oh, just something.' "'Nothing fierce.' "'Christopher Robin didn't say anything about fears. "'He just said it had an X.' "'It isn't their necks, I mind,' said Piglet earnestly. "'It's their teeth. but if Christopher Robin is coming, I don't mind anything.

In a little while, they were already at the top of the forest and the expedition started. First came Christopher Robin and rabbit, then piglet and poo, then can go with rue in her pocket, and owl, then e'or, and at the end in a long line, all of rabbits, friends, and relatives. I didn't ask them, explained Robert carelessly. They just came, they always do, they can march at the end after Eeyore. That's what I said, said Eeyore, is that it's unsettling. I don't want to come on this expo. What Poo said, I only came to oblige, but here I am, and if I am at the end of the expo,

what we're talking about, then let me be at the end. but if every time I want to sit down for a little rest, I have to brush away half a dozen of rabbits, smaller friends and relatives first, then this isn't an ex-po-whatever it is at all. It's simply a confused noise. That's what I say. I see what Eeyore means, said Owl.

If you ask me, I'm not asking anybody. said Ior. I'm just telling everybody. We can go look for the North Pole, or we could play, here we go gathering nuts with May, with the end part

of an ant's nest. It's all the same to me. There was a shout from the top of the line. Come on, said Christopher Robin. Come on, come on, said poo and piglet. Come on, said Owl.

We're starting, said Robin. I must go. And he hurried off to the front of the expedition with Christopher Robin. All right, said Eeyore. We're going, only don't blame me.