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Recently AprilMay 2024 Favorite reading, listens and miscellanea from April and May.

Design engineering writing and resources A growing collection of articles, books, blog posts and other resources about design engineering.

Design engineering a working definition A few thoughts on how we define the role of design engineer in the tech industry.

Recently March 2024 Favorite reading and miscellanea from the month of March.

Playing audio files in a Pi Pico without a DAC The Raspberry Pico is suddenly becoming my preferred chip for embedded development. It is well made, durable hardware, with a ton of features that appear designed with smartness and passion (the state machines driving the GPIOs are a killer feature!). Its main weakness, the lack of connectivity, is now resolved

On being a insert favorite technology here guy Thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of identifying too strongly with a technology or framework.

Pat Selinger The best way to hire great women is to have great women at the top of the company. IBM is a lot stronger for employing Pat Selinger for 29 years . She invented the relational database cost-based optimizer, a technology that sees continued use in relational database management systems today. But more

Seagate HAMR Yesterday, I visited the Seagate Normandale Minnesota hard disk drive wafer fabrication facility. I’m super excited about HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) and the areal density it supports. Seagate’s Dave Anderson first introduced this to me technology nearly 20 years ago and it’s wonderful to see it delivered to

CIDR 2024 I helped kick off CIDR2024 yesterday with the keynote, Constraint Driven Innovation. My core thesis is that constraints force innovation. For example, it was slow hard disks that drove the invention of Write Ahead Logging. But constraints also block innovation. In memory databases first described in the 80s remained largely irrelevant for

First Token Cutoff LLM sampling From a theoretical standpoint, the best reply provided by an LLM is obtained by always picking the token associated with the highest probability. This approach makes the LLM output deterministic, which is not a good property for a number of applications. For this reason, in order to balance LLMs creativity