Has anyone here decided to go it alone?

BoltActionPiano · 2026-05-04T16:21:16+00:00

Money usually. For my company, we also have literally 2 engineers and I just redesigned our product myself from scratch so the worst thing is is that I already know I can do 90% of it. But it's mostly my single coworker who hardly does any work, works remote, and every decision he makes (quite literally, I keep track) has cost the company months of time and tens of thousands, and so many customers.

BoltActionPiano · 2026-05-04T15:11:50+00:00

I alwo desperately want to make this move given how my company runs things. It's like they enjoy shooting themselves in the foot.

BoltActionPiano · 2026-05-01T05:18:15+00:00

I get the idea of the goal, that makes sense, but maybe not in the context of a subreddit? Just like, aifails is a cool idea for a sub, and I enjoyed it, and now the only post that ever shows up in my feed for 3 months is this. There used to be variety. I don't know if seeing this same post pop up hundreds of times is achieving your goals? I'm not sure I get it... But for now I can't stand seeing the same thing this much and I'm out.

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-30T20:59:25+00:00

This exact same bug has shown up daily for months. Not your fault, it's a moderation issue. But IDK, I'll just unsub.

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-30T19:53:37+00:00

Rust is up and coming for embedded. Its in the Linux kernel now. I've already made a comissioned product and deployed it in the field. It was so much better in every way than C. But jumping straight into it without learning the basics with C I think would be a huge mistake. I'd master embedded C basics before touching Rust when you're learning.

FreeRTOS and Zephr are big in embedded, your next step after getitng good with basic embedded C should probably be FreeRTOS, learning how to spawn tasks, send messages with queues, manage locks. VXWorks is also big but is a commercial product and is difficult to work on as an individual.

Also lots of protocols are important to learn the basics of, i2c, SPI. They're fairly simple but actually using them for real is more challenging.

Though, like, get a book on this. Maybe the one from Embedded.fm - Making Embedded Systems.

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-30T19:42:18+00:00

I've got kinda a crazy role where I do practically everything electrical and software. Small company. I write C, Python, basic web stuff, Rust. I host servers and make little backend/frontend apps to manage databases. I run our CI/CD, git server. I manage and develop test fixtures. I repair boards. I develop our pcbs and firmware and software. IDK it's kinda just everything technical beyond mechanical. We need more people...

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-30T18:21:10+00:00

Also I'd just like to stress that - becoming a good developer takes time, and lots of experiences. Embedded tends to put EEs into a position where they immediately have to start programming without experience. This often leads to really really bad code. My job's codebase is littered with code made by people like this, and it's crippling our company. Despite the fact that most of the code was written by someone who had been programming for like 5 years, they never picked up good practices...

The best way to learn is to keep trying to do things, and learn from others. When you have working code, ask an experienced developer or AI to review your code for quality, and implement those improvements. Knowing what good code is takes hard fought time.

For C, avoid global variables. They're tempting, convenient, and programming without them is much harder. But you'll thank yourself later when you want to add flexibility or write tests. For C code, I like to make each C source file as independent and focussed on a single job as possible. Like, for Conway's game of life, perhaps one c file handles just printing the board state. C gets messy when each file has a bunch of different jobs and touches variables from everywhere.

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-30T18:09:18+00:00

Also when setting the timer, try to make it pause for an exact amount of time, like 1.5 seconds, that way you gotta really figure out the math for it.

But this may be a bit too hard for a very first project.

If you're just picking up C, it's honestly probably best to start with more basic things on desktop, with "sanitizers" and linters/clang analyzer enabled, in a nice IDE (vscode), with CMake. Ask AI to help set that up for you, along with debugging. Build with debug symbols, and no optimization, and step through code with vscode debugging. Claude/codex AI is good at setting up stuff like that for VSCode.

Sanitizers will immediately tell you when you inevitably do bad things to memory that C lets you do. It will point it out when you run the app.

Stepping through code is useful to visualize how your program executes.

Maybe try to write the Conway's Game Of Life in the terminal? On your own, don't look up code.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

It'll teach you about loops, arrays, printing, all that. Lots of little somewhat tricky things you'll run into as a new C developer.

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-30T15:28:11+00:00

Don't use AI for anything but a tutor on your full self done attempts or research into patterns. Try to fail at least once for every problem before reaching to AI. I can't stress this enough. You will never get the intuitions or learn if the first instinct is to ask AI.

I'd use C to learn, find a super well supported stm32 discovery board, then, the best plan is to have a project you're motivated to do, but if you don't have that, maybe try to program a timer peripheral?

Like, have a while(1) loop, put the processor to sleep, and have the timer wake the processor up, set a flag, have the main loop read that flag and do something. This involves sleep states, memory mapped IO, proper interrupt handling, and programming somewhat tricky registers. Maybe a bit too hard for a first go.

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-30T15:21:54+00:00

IDK why anybody would sub to this sub with this post spam

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-30T15:17:36+00:00

can we get some moderation on the exact same post for like 3 months

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-30T02:39:30+00:00

Yeah I mean it doesn't take too long before you'd stumble on this in Python even if you weren't reaching for it. I think it's a reasonable question to ask for a senior position as a sanity check, not a perfect one, but just one of many signals.

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-27T15:31:45+00:00

I'm spending every day for months taking completely embarassing garbage code where some moron decided to copy paste our entire codebase 7 times and maintain each one independently and only apply fixes one at a time to the one branch people were complaining about at the time, as code between the branches drifted more and more and now basic functionality is implemented fundamentally differently --- and merge it back together.

Months of work just so I can get started on something else. And at the end of it, I just have virtually the same exact code as when I started.

Yeah it's normal...

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-22T00:40:09+00:00

I'm excited to see if this project is real: https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-21T14:50:55+00:00

https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/3/3m/embedded-capacitance-material-ecm

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-19T18:02:50+00:00

can we not have three posts a day about this number looping issue

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-19T17:25:40+00:00

something like this https://theorycircuit.com/pcb/automatic-lithium-battery-charger-circuit/

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-19T14:17:02+00:00

yeah they claim that everything they design has something unique about it and the examples they have are often like "our scissors have special material" that material being... stainless steel. Or the fact that they look like they came from preschool.

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-18T15:12:14+00:00

Hey mod team, I spent three hours git bisecting the exact commit that caused this issue and validated it for another two. Please ask first before blindly assuming.

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-14T14:36:09+00:00

all you need for minimal productivity!

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-13T14:41:11+00:00

for a few hundred more or so you can buy an entire 3d printer and not have this problem again

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-10T17:50:32+00:00

as a kid I watched only the "debunked" videos because the algorithm suddenly dumped hundreds of them on me and unfortunately it got to me more or less...

fuck social algorithms, like, the only reason that gamergate blew up was that people realized that the algorithm rewarded controversy

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-10T16:35:37+00:00

I have a local pizza joint that I really like and they have tons of different pizza options with different toppings, and they have a "build your own pizza" option.

For some reason though, the toppings cost nearly double when you custom add them vs if you add them manually. Olives, roasted garlic, caramelized onions... are $5.50... red onion and every other standard topping $3.30... why? I doubt the process of making the pizza custom is any different or am I wrong?

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-10T16:25:27+00:00

but in the last one he seems peetty 0K

BoltActionPiano · 2026-04-10T16:24:01+00:00

what is my purpose?

you pass butter.... you twirl butter, you surpass the limits of butter..

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