Recently, I was assigned to a project that assisted a customer in rapidly designing a micro controller embedded system capable of wired communication with other devices. Our involvement in the development of this project allowed the customer to focus on higher-level details, which were then built off of our implementation.
For the second year in a row, my year-in-review blog is being delivered well into the new year. That is getting dangerously close to a bad habit, so I will have to work on that for next year. On the plus side, this should get posted in February and thus I am technically only a month late of my goal of January for the target date. Normally I would not start at the end of the year, but this year is an exception because the single biggest piece of news is what happened at the very end of the year …
Software Architecture Overview Software Architecture is a key component in developing a long term, successful embedded system device. However, the topic of what is included in software architecture is complex. …
This fall I was offered the opportunity to participate in the Hour of Code activities at Cedar Falls Schools. Given my passion for coding and developing the next generation of …
In June 2015, I moved to the greater Milwaukee area to launch a new DISTek office. At the time, I was the only employee in the area but we wanted …
Eliciting a set of user stories can be a challenge when stakeholders are not sure where to begin their description of the solution they require. It is often up to Requirements Engineer (RE) to guide the stakeholders along in assessing the problem in need of a solution, as well as assessing the best solution for the problem. The RE must further help the stakeholders partition the solution’s description into manageable tasks, and express those tasks as User Stories. Workflow Driven Elicitation (WDE) is a systematic approach that helps achieve all of the above.
Monday October 22 was a pretty exciting day, the day DISTek recognized the first set of graduates from DISTek U. These 7 graduates completed all the coursework required of the Potential Leads Track, which included reading and answering discussion questions for the books How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni, and Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg. They also attended 7 Habits of Highly Effective People leadership training, and gave a presentation to the class and management team on their key takeaways. The group also heard from four current DISTek leaders on their perspective of being a leader, which was a highlight of the class. Below are some of the thoughts and experiences on the training from some of the graduates.
In my personal projects, I often work with various sensors which require digital data verification. One such sensor required the use of a Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) to verify that the information that the micro-controller read from the sensor was being received correctly. A CRC is a method for calculating a checksum from an array of data. The software examples that I was able to find to develop my understanding of implementing a CRC were poorly documented. Moreover, these examples were often so optimized that the underlying behavior was not immediately recognizable. Many examples simply used a lookup table—which provided no satisfaction for my “what-makes-it-tick?” personality.
The most recent AEF ISOBUS Plugfest was held just a little over a month ago, during September 2018. We returned to the Savoia Regency Hotel in Bologna, Italy, where Plugfest had previously been held in 2016.
DISTek knows how to do Halloween and, once again, this year did not disappoint.
Here at DISTek, one of our core values is to support the communities in which we live and work. It is in that spirit that we recently partnered with the American Red Cross and hosted a blood drive at our Cedar Falls office on Thursday, September 27th. As the carts were rolled in, our friends from the Red Cross transformed our training room into a blood collection facility.
