Well then. Ellen’s finished her GCSEs and is waiting for results to come through in a couple of days before jetting off to college: our home education journey is finally at an end. It’s been fun but I’m looking forward to a new direction after such a mammoth project. Looks like I’m not the only one ready for change as I’m now under orders to ‘get out from under my feet and find a proper job’. Given that it’s been getting on for ten years since I’ve done any serious software development I’m clearly going to have to do a little polishing and play a little catch up. Apparently valves are no longer à la mode in the difference engine world. Someone told me punched cards have been replaced as well but that was transparently a wind up. I mean… as if.
So it’s time for a plan. I’ve had a long time to consider what my next move was going to be and I’m pretty much coming back to my old stomping ground of embedded software. I want to shift emphasis a bit though, so I can get closer to the silicon. Quite a few of my spare time projects over the last few years have revolved round robotics and electronics so it seems like a good fit.
With that in mind here’s a rough outline of what I want to get done.
- C and C++ are obviously top of the list. I think it’s safe to say I could still make a living off Ada but my C and C++ is fresher and it’s a thoroughly respectable platform for embedded work.
- I’ve been living in Linux land for a few years now and it would make sense to leverage that experience into embedded Linux dev. There’s a whole world of devices out there taking this route.
- A refresher on some of the more CS type subjects wouldn’t hurt either. Could definitely do with some MT work, and a bit of practice on algorithms and data structures would be handy – I suspect the likes of Boost and huge swathes of the standard library aren’t going to be available if I end up on restricted resource platforms.
- I’m not too badly off tooling-wise. I’ve been using Emacs and Sublime Text and Git and the like quite a lot but it would be sensible to delve a bit more deeply into the likes of Eclipse and IAR and CCS. Need to dig a bit deeper into Make and GCC as well. And finally get an Eclipse Tiva toolchain up and running on Linux.
- I’ve been playing with Raspberry Pi and Arduino and a couple of TIs dev boards for MSP430G2 and CortexM4. Definitely going to spend more time with this. Probably hack some Lego Technic PF stuff and build a robot platform of some description to build some interesting projects.
- Longer term I want to do a few Electronics MOOCs, work through some books and projects and I definitely want to have another crack at the Signals and Systems MOOC from IIT Bombay – need an intro text first though I think.
Seems like quite a lot to do once it’s all written down like that…