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by Logical Elegance
I am Elecia White alongside Christopher White. We're here to chat about the interests, careers, and lives of engineers, artists, educators and makers. Our diverse guest list includes names you may have heard and engineers working quietly in the trenches. Either way, they are knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and inspiring. We'd love to share our enthusiasm for science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM).
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- 1 weeks ago1h 8m
530: A Living Highlighter
Marine biologist Dr. Steven Haddock joins the show to share the alien, glowing, and transparent wonders of the deep ocean. We discuss his beautiful new book, The Radiant Sea, and explore the complex engineering and high-sensitivity optics required to capture living deep-sea creatures. Steve walks us through the evolutionary logic of biological light, how vantablack organisms trap photons in the dark, the horizontal sun-compass navigation of jellyfish blooms, and what it's like to play games underwater with giant Pacific octopuses and jumbo squids. Dr. Steven Haddock is a Senior Scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and an adjunct professor at UC Santa Cruz. Some related MBARI Videos Bioluminescence in the deep sea: How and why do animals create their own light? Steven Haddock explains the diverse and striking functions of light emission in the ocean's twilight zone. (So many pretty pictures!) Mysteries of the Deep with Dr. Steve Haddock — Bioluminescence! Long-form lecture on the physics and evolutionary biology of bioluminescence. Live Blackwater Diving Q&A with MBARI and Aquarium Scientists! | Into The Deep Q&A with scientists about diving in the middle of the ocean at night. Rarely Encountered Seven-Arm Octopus in Monterey Bay: Footage captured by Steve Haddock and MBARI's Biooptics team shows an octopus with a jelly snack. Discussion Resources & Links Steve's Books: The Radiant Sea: Color and Light in the Underwater World by Steven Haddock and Sönke Johnsen Practical Computing for Biologists by Steven Haddock and Casey Dunn Scientific & Marine Mentions: Steven Haddock's Wikipedia Page Steven's MBARI home page. His lab is the Biodiversity and Biooptics Lab Electric Disco Clams Exist—Watch Them Light Up This Coral Reef | National Geographic Why is she like this? Disco Snails (Official Video) - Music More neat creature videos Jelly-like Siphonophores Astound with Breathtaking Beauty: A close-up collection of the incredibly complex, colonial siphonophores that Steve mentioned, showing off their bizarre structures and flowing shapes in the pitch black. How the Disco Clam Uses Light to Fight Super-Strong Predators: See the "electric" flashing effects inside the disco clam's mantle up close, alongside an explanation of how their silica spheres scatter ambient light to startle predators. Absurd Creatures: Comb Jellies Are Ready to Rave – A fun, fast-paced video exploring the "Skittles" rainbow iridescence caused by the moving rows of cilia on ctenophores under white submersible lights. Transcript
- 3 weeks ago1h 22m
529: The Narwhal Looked Amazing
Chris Svec returns to the show to discuss the messy, non-linear realities of engineering management and onboarding new college graduates. We explore why companies should bother hiring fresh grads in the first place, how to prevent junior developers from going dark when they get stuck, and why admitting ignorance publicly is an absolute workplace superpower. Along the way, we dive into managing genius firmware engineering hires, battling technical debt and software entropy, and why your development team shouldn't communicate solely through pull request comments. Chris Svec is the Director of Embedded Software Engineering at Insulet. If you're looking for an experienced leadership or management thought partner to help scale your development team, Chris Svec offers private coaching and consulting. You can reach him directly at the email given in the show (or hit the contact link and we'll forward your message along). RECOMMENDED BOOKS FOR ENGINEERING MANAGERS & TECH LEADS The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier – A guide for navigating tech leadership and managing engineering teams. Resilient Management by Lara Hogan – A book dedicated to the human side of engineering management. SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE & EMBEDDED SYSTEMS RESOURCES A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout – A high-level philosophical perspective on software engineering and architecture. The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas – A classic text on software development best practices. Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky – Insights on software development methodologies and managing tech teams. Making Embedded Systems by Elecia White – A comprehensive guide to firmware design patterns and embedded architecture. Embedded for Everyone by Nathan Jones – A curated repository of accessible embedded system learning resources. EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMING GAMES Shenzhen I.O. by Zachtronics – An interactive puzzle game for learning assembly programming. Typer Shark! Deluxe – A classic game to improve typing speed and precision for developers. MENTIONS AND EPISODE CONTEXT Embedded.fm blog post: Resilience is a Skill and Embedded Skills Tree The "Meow Meow Beans" episode from the TV show Community (season 5, episode 8), see a snippet. All Systems Red by Martha Wells – The sci-fi novel featured in today's closing quote If you want to dive into Svec's previous appearances on the podcast, be sure to check out: 78: Happy Cows (His very first appearance, discussing empathy in software development) 250: Yolo Snarf (All about version control, gitflow, and D&D) 297: Mice to Do My Bidding (Focusing on attentional focus and workflow psychological tricks) 402: We Are a Lazy Species (Software schedule estimation alongside Philip Johnston) <
- Jun 25, 20261h 10m
528: Goldfish Chunks
Tyler Hoffman returns to the show to discuss diagnostics and observability data in embedded systems. We catch up on his life after startup acquisition, explore the hows and whys of keeping product data separate from operational data, and consider the realities of fleet management at scale. Tyler is the co-founder of Memfault. Memfault was acquired by Nordic Semiconductor about a year ago. While Nordic has nRF Cloud as a smaller scale solution for Nordic devices (~100 devices), Memfault will continue to maintain support for non-Nordic platforms as well. During the discussion, Tyler advocates for a "device-in-control" philosophy, emphasizing that edge devices should retain the intelligence to manage their own firmware updates and telemetry. We also discuss the practical constraints of remote fleet debugging, outlining why tools built for high-bandwidth web infrastructure will quickly bankrupt an IoT company, and identifying exactly when a project is too low-bandwidth, or too small, to justify an external observability platform. Christopher shares his recent experiences with Memfault which leads to a discussion of chunks, flash memory buffers and MDS. The Memfault Diagnostic Service (MDS) is a standardized way for BLE devices to send the chunk payloads to a gateway device (mobile phone) which can then forward the data to the Memfault cloud. If you want a deep dive into the reasoning around starting Memfault, Tyler was on Embedded.fm episodes 390: Irresponsible At the Time and 395: I Can No Longer Play Ping Pong. Reaching back into the archives, Elecia, Tyler, and Phillip Johnston were on the Memfault Coredump Sessions podcast, a special crosspost with Embedded.fm, episode 451: From Concept to Launch You can also find technical deep dives on Memfault's Interrupt blog. "What we do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make." – Dr. Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey. Transcript
- Jun 12, 20261h 9m
527: At The Jellyfish Conference
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 interpret
- May 28, 20261h 1m
526: Take A Taste Of Engineers
Dr. Victoria Serrano spoke with us about STEM outreach, fostering curiosity, and inspiring students with engineering education. Victoria is a professor at the Technological University of Panama (her faculty page: UTP | Dra. Victoria Serrano). Her youtube channel is CIATEC PANAMA which talks about circuits, electronics, and robotics. The channel goes along with her ciatecpanama.com website which shows the types of courses and outreach she does with Arduino UNOs and other low cost equipment. Victoria is also a Fulbright Scholar, an IEEE STEM Champion 2023, and Honorable Mention IEEE Rising Stars Conference 2024. She also received the IEEE EAB Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education in 2019 (the award Elecia and Chris believe is related to their work on Embedded.fm and for which they were honored to be nominated). The final quote was from Haben Girma's book: Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law. Transcript
- May 14, 20261h 3m
525: Some Sort of Metal
Dr. Tom Williams spoke with us about robots, ethics, teaching, and books. Then we talked about mines, umpires, water, and more books. Tom is the author of Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice (free at MIT Press: Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice!). As part of the discussion, we talked about some other books and media: Nonfiction: Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI by Ayanna Howard (Embedded episodes 367: Data of Our Lives and 207: I Love My Robot Monkey Head) Embodied AI Safety: Reimagining safety engineering for artificial intelligence in physical systems by Philip Koopman (related Embedded episode 514: Just Turn Off All the Computers) Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford Waki Kamino's research on robot umpires: Beyond Accuracy: Rethinking the Value of AI in Decision-Making Through Baseball's Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) System (or see the summary in the Cornell Chronicle: AI on deck: assessing impact of MLB's new ball-strike system) Fiction: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chalmers Platform Decay (The Murderbot Diaries Book 8) by Martha Wells (Embedded episode 432: Robot Bechdel Test) Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor The Good Place TV show was mentioned a few times as an introduction to ethics for people who prefer their education crammed with amusement. Critical Role web series There was a discussion about water use in AI. Tom recommends Why is Everyone So Wrong About AI Water Use?? while Elecia unsurprisingly mispronounces synecdoche. Tom is a computer science professor at the Colorado School of Mines where he runs the Mines Interactive Robotics Research Lab (MIRROR lab). See also Tom's page on mines.edu. The final quote is from an essay written by Karel Capek and translated to English in in The Man Who Coined the Word "Robot" Defends Himself - IEEE Spectrum.
- Apr 16, 20261h 14m
524: This Isn't a Movie
Nathan Jones spoke with us about hardware security, motivation, conference talks, and writing. Nathan wrote an in-depth series of posts about the benefits of superloops vs RTOS: You Don't Need an RTOS (Part 1), Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. He also wrote about How Hardware Gets Hacked (Part 1) and Part 2 which discusses the MITRE embedded CTF (Capture the Flag) challenge. See his EmbeddedRelated profile and Digikey profile. And Nathan's excellent Embedded for Everyone Github repo. Nathan recommends The Hardware Hacking Handbook by Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn. It is an excellent resource on embedded security. We spoke with Jasper about the book in 431: Becoming More of a Smurf and with Colin about the Chip Whisperer in 286: Twenty Cans of Gas. The European Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) has specific features that are required to be implemented by all devices that want the safety CE label. This is important for products shipping to Europe. If you are going to the Embedded Online Conference, you can get a discount with the code JONES100. Nathan will be giving a workshop on the Chip Whisperer Nano. (Recent guest Mark Omo will also be presenting: Security for the Rest of Us: What Matters and Where to Start.) Another conference for the security-minded is Hardwear.io which is in Santa Clara, CA, USA at the end of May and in Amsterdam in November. Last year, Nathan spoke about Exception Handling for EOC 2025 (video). Elecia mentioned her own Creating Chaos and Hard Faults from EOC 2024. The Embedded Slack book club is reading The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition. Well, some of us are just watching. The quote came from Elizabeth Bear's Ancestral Night (White Space) which is part of a series with some neat mechanics around brain chemistry. Transcript
- Apr 2, 20261h 10m
523: Bad Experience With Donuts
Chris and Elecia chat about Leapfrog toys, things they like, large company politics, awards, and open source governance. The Toy Story 5 Trailer with LilyPad toy which is suspiciously similar to the LeapFrog LeapPad tablet. Which is different from the original LeapPad which had cartridges and capacitive touch (capacitive touch was used on the globe as well… the latest globe also has a screen). Why does Elecia want an award? Who knows? But right now, she's getting ready for a listener to nominate the show (Chris and Elecia) for IEEE's Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education. Probably. But we've got nominators and endorsers so that's mostly sorted. She also signed Embedded up for the Women Podcasters Award which is a popularity contest. You can vote here: www.womenpodcasters.com/awards-voting. The show is under the Science Podcasters category. Some things we like: Ctrl-R: In a command shell, ctrl-r searches your history. Better than ! because you don't have to remember as much. Data bars in Excel: This can create a plot of your data in the column. Merlin Bird ID: Want to know what bird is making that sound? Want to know the name of the bird you just saw? Merlin Bird ID is a free app that is amazing. Plucky Cards: Want to have a 1:1 where you talk about more than your status? Choose a card, any card. Or maybe just look through and have a 1:1 by yourself Just reading about Bunnie Huang's new RISCV board Dabao Evaluation Board for Baochip-1x taught us things! We're not sure what we'd use it for yet but it does spark a few ideas. The Embedded.fm Patreon Slack book club is reading Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition. Talking about open source projects and governance models, we referenced three contributing guidelines: Valetudo, ESPHome, and Zephyr. Some later research led to Leadership and Governance | Open Source Guides and presentation by Cornelius Schumacher – The spectrum of FOSS governance models (Slides). The link between the politics associated with the size of companies and the open source governance models clearly needs a bit more thought. Transcript
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About Embedded
I am Elecia White alongside Christopher White. We're here to chat about the interests, careers, and lives of engineers, artists, educators and makers. Our diverse guest list includes names you may have heard and engineers working quietly in the trenches. Either way, they are knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and inspiring. We'd love to share our enthusiasm for science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM).
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