I haven't paid any attention to the robotics world in ages and in the last six months I've discovered a bunch of interesting things people have been doing with less instead of more. Particular standouts are tiny maze-running robots, and classifications of fighting robots by weight. There's a guy with a bot named 'cheesecake' that has some interesting videos.

I think we could all do with celebrating the small. ESP32 and STM32 have hit a point where you can do modest computing tasks on them without having to become an embedded hardware expert to do so. I'm at one of those crossroads in my career and I'm trying to decide if I double down on a new web friendly programming language (maybe Elixir) or jump into embedded.

I've done a reasonable amount of programming in the small, several times tricked into it, and while it's as challenging if not moreso in the middle of doing the work, the nostalgia factor after the fact is much higher than most of the other things I've done.