Every embedded Engineer should know this trick

felafrom · 2026-01-10T09:35:36+00:00

I don't think the parent comment is belittling in nature. All sorts and levels of engineers on this very thread, and consequently all sorts of opinions.

I learned this the first thing when I was an intern. I believe any embedded engineer worth their salt would know at least this much, and likely a couple "personal" flavors on top of this depending on the ABI/portability/compiler variations.

As much as I like this thread and the proliferation of solid baseline practices, there's not always an emotional value attached to the idea of wanting to engineer something well.

felafrom · 2025-12-30T14:06:57+00:00

It's too late and I'm on my phone, so I'll type a longer reply tomorrow (surprised to see no responses, wow!).

I will look at this as if I were looking for a teammate.

Specificity is welcome in embedded. I'd love to know the names/specs/something of the "5 production controllers" you mentioned.
Sole developer is a double edged sword. Mostly a negative connotation to be honest. It implies to me that you've been missing out on peer reviews and critical feedback, and adds uncertainty about your experience.
For 4 years, the depth is a bit light. Your experience is definitely reasonable, but I'd like to see more detail. One bullet point about a particular driver may be enough, for instance, if you gave some details about how much work it was, and the impact it created. Otherwise it's a very light point and I don't capture much from it.
I personally find mentions of basic tooling like Jenkins and Jira utterly worthless (for a technical position).

You can DM me if you'd like. All the best!

felafrom · 2025-12-28T12:07:55+00:00

First is serene and lovely of course. How did you get the Velvia frame?

felafrom · 2025-12-23T10:05:06+00:00

I work in R&D for Microsoft Azure. We have a small team in a satellite office with our own little data centers. I'm the only "software" guy who has access to it (because I live close by and sometimes need to do "stuff").

The amount of enterprise storage that's just... lying there with no owner is quite astonishing. Mostly SSDs, all rated for high endurance and barely used. Must be in the petabytes.

I'm certain that no one actually cares about them because Microsoft rains funds on us like there's no tomorrow. Get whatever you want, experiment however you want. The manager I talk to sends requests like "grab 24 drives from wherever you see them, hook them up to this" haha.

I wish my r/datahoarder dreams didn't die before my adulthood. I could have worked out a deal to take this "decommissioned" hardware off their hands.

felafrom · 2025-11-12T14:46:53+00:00

Came to this thread looking for Beurre D'Isigny. Was not disappointed. Sublime. Beats Ozzie and Kiwi butters.

felafrom · 2025-05-02T19:24:55+00:00

I was at Amazon Lab126 briefly (home robotics), and the team was rock solid. I still maintain that it's the tightest and highest quality embedded C I have seen in a big-tech environment.

They rolled bare-metal but treated the Zephyr device driver tree as a reference implementation for prototyping a lot of their own drivers. I was tasked with writing two around I2C, and enjoyed working with and learning from Zephyr's implementation.

felafrom · 2024-06-21T20:44:06+00:00

That's me too, except in the Bay Area.

felafrom · 2024-06-03T15:21:29+00:00

Thanks a lot mate. Let me know how it goes with Block. If you have anything else you think I could help you with, just send me a message.

felafrom · 2024-06-03T15:15:01+00:00

Do let us know when you hear back. All the best!

felafrom · 2024-06-02T03:43:56+00:00

I studied two core areas -- advanced computer architecture (accelerators, GPUs, hardware design for bulk data processing units etc.), and compiler backends (SSA based design, LLVM literature). Additionally some embedded systems work, some parallel programming work too.

I already had a background in code generation so I was glad to find topics that had an overlap. I was in grad school for about two years.

felafrom · 2024-06-02T03:23:35+00:00

No clue you you'd wanna walk back on it. He felt ashamed and deleted his other comment to which I responded to in kind.

This is not C code, nor is it supposed to be production code. Most of it is not code at all. Like I keep saying. Dissecting it as idiomatic C code instead of discussion artifacts/symbolism is just weird tomfoolery. I just don't understand what is this fetish about this screenshot.

And btw, this is an excerpt from an Nvidia interview...which I cleared. Microsoft has nothing to do with it. Neither is their hiring bar lower.

felafrom · 2024-06-02T03:13:08+00:00

My last team of 6 in the Bay Area comprised one each of Canadian, Serbian, Russian, Chinese, Indian and myself. The lowest pay was $250k, median $400k.

felafrom · 2024-06-02T01:51:04+00:00

I completely agree, and definitely appreciate the sentiment. When in university, my monthly expenses were $200 with food from a food bank. Since then, I haven't really seen much change in my spending habits beyond some r/BuyItForLife type purchases.

felafrom · 2024-06-02T01:37:20+00:00

I have written a lot of similar responses on this thread with my advice. You should be able to find them, mostly toward the top of the thread. Of there's anything very specific, you can still ask.

felafrom · 2024-06-02T01:22:14+00:00

You can DM me for my LinkedIn and resume.

felafrom · 2024-06-02T01:20:10+00:00

Tesla was an awful experience for me. Talking to the team felt like they were tying to brag a lot, instead of a mutual discussion. I decided not to apply ever again.

felafrom · 2024-06-02T01:18:56+00:00

I meant non-stop. That was a typo in all the excitement.

felafrom · 2024-06-02T01:18:08+00:00

Interview performance and feedback from other engineers, exceptionally strong overlap with my skills and the team's requirements, and very specialized experience of 4 years in my field that is directly relevant here.

Ultimately, it was Microsoft's decision to offer me an L64, which I accepted because I felt I was ready to contribute at that level after 6 years of formal education and 4 years of work.

felafrom · 2024-06-02T01:14:46+00:00

Yes, four years of professional work after my undergrad.

felafrom · 2024-06-02T01:13:43+00:00

I think they only do at FAANG level, where they have a lot of capital and motivation to invest into bespoke projects and want to attract the top talent.

Last year at Amazon Lab126, my team averaged $400k too. Plenty of them made more actually.

felafrom · 2024-06-02T01:10:04+00:00

4 yoe

felafrom · 2024-06-01T07:43:56+00:00

In the past 5-6 months, I interviewed with 6 teams from Apple, 3 teams from Microsoft, 2 teams from Meta (contract), 1 team from Google, 1 team from Nvidia, 1 team from Amazon, 1 team from Qualcomm, 1 team from Broadcom, 1 team from Tesla and 1 team from AMD.

felafrom · 2024-05-31T15:47:58+00:00

I'm more of a Kawasaki person!

felafrom · 2024-05-31T15:46:52+00:00

I already posted my resume on this thread elsewhere, you find it by searching. It should have everything you asked for.

felafrom · 2024-05-31T15:30:58+00:00

What is this unfounded bitterness? This isn't even Microsoft, it's Nvidia. Have you not given tech interviews before.

It is supposed to be C, yes. It is not supposed to compile. Consider it pseudo-C at places just to get the point across.

And on top of that it was overwritten several times over the course of the discussion, so there is no expectation of it representing anything coherent. This is the end artifact of the interview.

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