423: Speaking of Aardvarks

Phillip Johnston joined us to talk about how engineering approaches can change over time. 

This conversation started with Phillip’s Embedded Artistry blog post How Our Approach to Abstract Interfaces Has Changed Over the Years. His new course is Designing Embedded Software for Change. 

Embedded Artistry has a Design Pattern Catalogue (though Elecia was looking at Software design patterns on Wikipedia during the podcast). https://github.com/embvm 

Phillip is working with Memfault on an ongoing embedded systems panel. The first topic they covered was observability metrics for IoT devices. There is a panel coming up on how to debug embedded devices in production.

Some reading that Phillip mentioned:

• Toward a New Model of Abstraction in Software Engineering by Gregor Kiczales

• A Procedure for Designing Abstract Interfaces for Device Interface Modules by Kathryn Heninger Britton, R. Alan Parker, David L. Parnas

• Designing Software for Ease of Extension and Contraction by  David L. Parnas (1979)

• Design Patterns for Embedded Systems in C: An Embedded Software Engineering Toolkit by Bruce Powel Douglass

• Best Paper Awards in Computer Science from Jeff Huang 

Creating a Circular Buffer in C and C++ - Embedded Artistry

Aardvark I2C/SPI Host Adapter - Total Phase 

Transcript