Little Things

Things that never fail to fill me with childlike giddiness:

  • When code that I wrote talks over a network.
  • When multi-threaded code that I wrote shows evidence of actually doing two or more things in parallel.
  • When my code makes an LED blink.
  • When my code makes a motor move.

These are not new things to me, but each time I do them with a new piece of hardware or as part of a new project it fills me with such wonder and joy, and once it’s done it’s still fun to run the code over and over and watch it happen again and again. It takes a long time for the satisfied feeling to wear off. It’s even more amazing if it’s more than one of those in combination (multi-threaded blinking of many LEDs, over a network, while moving a motor!). I haven’t confessed this to anyone before, but lately I’ve seen engineers more seasoned than I show the same excitement that I feel in these same scenarios, and I believe that I am not alone. It’s the little things that count.

Comments

Anonymous said…
It's an amazing feeling when something you "create" does something on the real world. To me is a feeling that never wears off and think I'm lucky to be paid to do this kind of things.

Great post.
October 7, 2009 at 10:27 PM
Unknown said…
Being an ECE in training, i know how you feel. Our lab project last semester was programming a robot arm and it was a wonderful experience, both getting it to work and messing up watch it thud against the table.
October 8, 2009 at 5:36 AM
Vernon Mauery said…
The breadboard with the atmega8, the digital pot, the 4x16 text lcd and the two blinking LEDs on my desk whole-heartedly agree with you.

When I managed to get the LED blink out "Hello World!" in Morse Code, I must have watched it for 20 minutes.
October 10, 2009 at 10:10 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SystemVerilog Fork Disable "Gotchas"

This is a long post with a lot of SystemVerilog code. The purpose of this entry is to hopefully save you from beating your head against the wall trying to figure out some of the subtleties of SystemVerilog processes (basically, threads). Subtleties like these are commonly referred to in the industry as "Gotchas" which makes them sound so playful and fun, but they really aren't either. I encourage you to run these examples with your simulator (if you have access to one) so that a) you can see the results first hand and better internalize what's going on, and b) you can tell me in the comments if this code works fine for you and I'll know I should go complain to my simulator vendor. OK, I'll start with a warm-up that everyone who writes any Verilog or SystemVerilog at all should be aware of, tasks are static by default. If you do this: module top; task do_stuff ( int wait_time); #wait_time $display ( "waited %0d, then did stuff" , wa
Read more

'git revert' Is Not Equivalent To 'svn revert'

I just learned that if you have some changes in your working tree that you want to get rid of, you don't type 'git revert' like you might guess. No, that's what cvs, subversion, mercurial, and bazaar (to name a few) use revert to mean, but not git. With git, revert is used to undo actual commits. Thankfully, you can undo your revert with another 'git revert', I just learned. So let me repeat to be clear, if you have changes to your working files that you want to abandon, DO NOT do this: git revert HEAD That will undo your last commit. Do this instead: git reset --hard HEAD I'm glad I have that straightened out now. I'm wondering if /etc was really a good place for me to start out playing with git. UPDATE: Nearly two years later and I'm still getting comments on this. I'm glad I've been able to help people out this way. The discussion in the comments is good, and one thing I'd like to point out is that I now always use
Read more

Git Rebase Explained

Image
Introduction Rebase is a helpful git command that can be used to turn a branchy two-headed version history into an easy to follow linear one. A linear history is much easier for a human eye to follow and a human brain to understand. Rebase is a very safe command to use, despite some fear that people have about it. This post should explain how rebase works and clear up any misunderstandings about it. Rebase Basics The short summary of rebase is that it cuts commits out of the git history and reconnects them somewhere else. Let's say the common scenario comes up: you commit a change to the main branch of a repository, you then run  git fetch , and in come a couple changes that other people made on the main branch. If your commit is version 46f and the others that just came in on the fetch are versions ef9 and 4a2, your version history might look like this: The main branch now has two heads, 46f and 4a2. You can run  git rebase  to disconnect your commit from version d88 and connect i
Read more