It’s another Elecia and Chris episode and this time we cover handling hourly work when the task doesn’t neatly divide into hours, using Docker (and Conda and Virtualenv) for development, growing the podcast, overdoing conference talks, and trying to find a new laptop. Phew! The Embedded Online Conference is coming up the week of May 17th 2021, and Elecia’s talk will be Buried Treasure and Map Files (Note: the coupon code is still valid and mentioned early in the episode. Elecia will also put up a copy of her talk on YouTube after some time.)

Anne Barela (@anne_engineer) spoke with us about working as an engineer in the US Foreign Service and writing tutorials for Adafruit. Anne has also written two books: Getting Started with Adafruit Trinket and Getting Started with Adafruit Circuit Playground Express. To see Anne’s writing on Adafruit, check out her page: learn.adafruit.com/users/AnneBarela We also looked at Adafruit’s Home Automation board.

Doug Ellison (@doug_ellison), Engineering Camera Team Lead at NASA’s JPL and Martian photographer, spoke with us about low power systems, cameras, clouds, and dust devils on Mars. The best paper for learning more is from NASA’s JPL site: The Mars Science Laboratory Engineering Cameras Mars rovers wiki

Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) spoke with us about cheese, making, work, the reverse engineering podcast, weather, and motivation. Alvaro is a host of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering podcast. Some of his favorite episodes include #41 with Samy Kamkar, #14 with Joe Grand, and #23 with Major Malfunction. (Jen Costillo co-hosts the show and has been on Embedded several times.) Alvaro works at Sofar Ocean, making oceanic sensing platforms. He has a personal website linking to his other exploits. We talked about some Embedded episodes as well: #282 with Laughlin Barker about OpenROV #174 with Evan Shapiro about baby monitors and professional poker  Also, we’ve all really enjoyed the Disney’s Mandolorian.

Chris and Elecia talk with each other about contracting, architecture, origami research, Digilent’s new oscilloscope, TensorFlow, map files, conference talks, art and the upcoming 12AX7 album. Digilent sent us a pre-production Analog Discovery Pro ADP3450. Elecia’s Origami Github. Embedded Patreon Embedded Online Conference talk Buried Treasure and Map Files (Note: the coupon code from Jacob’s show is still valid and Elecia will put up a copy of her talk on YouTube.) 12XA7, we’ll let you know when the Kickstarter goes live.

Finally! An episode with version control! And D&D! Chris Svec (@christophersvec) joins us to discuss why version control is critical to professional software development and what the most important concepts are. T-Shirts are on sale for a limited time: US distributor and EU distributor. You can read more from Chris on the Embedded Blog. He writes the ESE101 column (new posts soon!). If you are new to version control or learning git, Atlassian has a great set of posts and tutorials from high level “what is version control?” to helping you figure out good usage models (Svec mentioned gitflow). Atlassian has an interactive tutorial that lets you try out the repository commands (or try the Github interactive tutorials). Of course, there is a good O’Reilly book about git. If you are using SVN (aka Subversion), the Red Bean book from O’Reilly is a good resource. (Elecia's shirt said You Obviously Like Owls from topatoco.com.)

Al Sweigart (@AlSweigart) spoke with us about getting better at Python programming.  Al’s book site is InventWithPython.com. You can find his books there as well as No Starch Press and Amazon.  Automate the Boring Stuff with Python Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python Cracking Codes with Python Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python Al’s personal site (alsweigart.com) has talks, videos, and a lot of code to look at. Or check out his github repo including the small text based games: https://github.com/asweigart/pythonstdiogames Al’s YouTube Channel, including his Calm Programming series. We also talked about: scratch.mit.edu - a fun way to learn to program where you are almost never wrong Fluent Python: Clear, Concise, and Effective Programming by Luciano Ramalho. PyCon and their talk videos  Online origami simulator (origamisimulator.org)

Dr. Ayanna Howard (@robotsmarts, wiki) spoke with us about sex, race, and robots.  Ayanna’s Audible book is Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI. You can see more of her research from her Google Scholar page. Find some best practices and tools for reducing bias AI: Partnership on AI  AI Fairness 360 (IBM) Model Cards (Google) Ayanna has recently moved from being Professor and Department Chair at Georgia Tech to be Dean of Engineering at The Ohio State University. Her current favorite robot is Pepper. Ayanna spoke more about her robotics and trust research on Embedded 207: I Love My Robot Monkey Head (transcript). 

Laurel Cummings (@justblamelaurel) teaches people how to build what is required with the material on hand. We talked with her about how to engineer survival solutions on-the-fly, often while performing disaster relief. Also: what could be made with chewing gum and paper clips. Laurel works at Building Momentum (buildmo.com). They are currently hiring. Laurel spoke at SuperCon 2019 about Austere Engineering.

Cy Keener spoke with us about sensors, Arduinos, ice, and the crossover between art and science. You can see some of his field work and gallery installations at his site: cykeener.com and on his vimeo channel. Cy is an art professor at the University of Maryland (bio, youtube) Cy’s advisor at Stanford was Paul DeMarinis (pauldemarinis.org, Stanford page). Arduiniana: a blog of useful Arduino libraries We also talked about some custom sensors by Lovro Valcic of Bruncin (bruncin.com).