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I turned down a job in Oregon this year because they wanted me to sign an IP assignment clause to that effect and refused to budge when I asked them to remove it.

Came here to say the same! I'm a C++ programmer by day, but I love the speed at which I can bang out a prototype in Love2D (Lua).

I found kikito's[1] bump, gamera, and anim8 libraries to be excellent complements to Love, adding a few of the otherwise missing elements.

[1] https://github.com/kikito/

I hadn't recognized the equivalency of [lean] and agile before. That's interesting and helps give me a better appreciation for why we only end up paying lip service to the idea. Thanks for the thought.

Added to my queue, thanks!

Definitely "The Machine That Changed the World" by Womack, Jones, and Roos [0]. This is "the first book to reveal Toyota's lean production system." Before reading it, I had never imagined just-in-time production or value chain mapping, or vehicle assembly lines that can profitably produce quantity one of a product before being reconfigured to produce a different model (SMED: single minute exchange of die).

Now I see muda everywhere and cringe when I overhear people talking about applying kaizen and how they think they're practicing "continuous improvement" while repeating the same rote, industrial, mindless processes that they have been for the last 40 years. We can do so much better. Toyota tried very hard to teach GM how at their NUMMI[1] plant, but it wasn't the right location relative to their suppliers for JIT to fully work and "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

[0] https://www.lean.org/Bookstore/ProductDetails.cfm?SelectedPr... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI

This year I read "Clean Coder" by Robert Martin and "The Software Craftsman: Professionalism, Pragmatism, Pride" by Sandro Mancuso.

They were both excellent and I recommend them to any programmer who wants to improve his or her Engineering professionalism and craft. Don't be a "coder," be a professional Software Engineer. Take pride in your work, do your best work possible, and stand up to insane, unrealistic management.

  Location: Seattle, WA
  Remote: Open to it
  Willing to relocate: Only within Washington and Oregon
  Technologies: bare-metal and RTOS-based embedded C & C++ in avionics. Delphi, Python, and Lua for Windows tools.
  Résumé/CV: Available on my portfolio website https://coderjames.bitbucket.io/
  Email: james@jdooley.org

Raptor codes are powerful, but one has to be careful with them, as they are heavily patent encumbered by Qualcomm according to Wikipedia[1]:

"Raptor codes are heavily covered with patents in various jurisdictions. For the specific instances specified in RFCs, statements by patent owners may or may not provide some leeway, depending among other things on whether the device carrying the implementation also implements a "wide-area wireless" specification."

So I encourage people who otherwise work with Error-Correcting codes to tread lightly when considering implementing Raptor and RaptorQ codes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_code

the quality of the product. "Good enough" is never actually good enough for me

I hear you loud and clear. One way to get a higher standard of quality may be to switch industries. In aviation, where bugs can cost lives, there tends to be a higher standard. You may still find the bar of your co-workers isn't as high as yours, but it will definitely be higher than at a consumer-products or web-facing company. I know, I've interviewed at a few of those and turned down follow-up interviews and offers because they don't care enough about quality to do QA.

"Devs push to prod; rollback and page someone if it breaks" isn't acceptable when the customer isn't able to take 300 aircraft out of service every week to load your latest release.

I recently became a multi-millionaire (not from crypto) and this is so true. I'm less happy than I was

Even though I'm young, I feel as though I'm entrenched in this game now with no viable way out.

I'd be happy to take those unwanted millions off your hands so that you could return to the life you miss. I'm the breadwinner of a single-income family in the Seattle area and I don't make a FANG-level salary. If we could afford to buy a home instead of renting, I think we'd be much happier.

Agreed. The PIC32MZ is a neat MIPS microcontroller (if you're able to tolerate the MPLab Xpress IDE). Unfortunately the cheapest PIC32 board they offer is the DM320001 at $50. I picked up a SAMD10 "Xplained mini" for $9 from Digikey, and one can get sub-$2 STM32F103 boards from AliExpress.

Arguably the Cortex-M0+-based D10 isn't really comparable to the PIC32, but that's sort of the point. No Arduino-sized community is going to develop around an architecture with a $50 minimum entry point... Maybe I should stop complaining about it and try to fix it :-)

Now if only there was somebody besides Microchip making low-cost dev kits for these things, maybe we could have some fun and get a MIPS revival.

I can get ARM microcontroller boards for $10 - $20 from ST, Microchip (nee Atmel), SiLabs, etc. More powerful ARMs in any flavor of Pi that I want.

Where do I buy a low-end interAptive or microAptive board? The Creator CI20 is super interesting, but no on-board debugger included. The LinkIt MT7688 modules don't even bring out the JTAG pins.

An aircraft's Flight Management Computer uses a Kalman filter to combine the data from all available sensors (GPS, IMU, altimeter, ADC, VOR, DME, etc.) to compute the position of the aircraft.