darthcloud

Author here.

I wrote a retrospective that might be interesting to read to some: https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro/discussions/289

In this article, I detail how my initial goal of leaning more about Bluetooth and sell a product turned into a software platform makers now use to sell their own hardware take base on my original design.

You can easily give the project a try without building a full adapter. If you got a dev board with the original ESP32 you can flash [1] the BlueRetro_pad_test.bin firmware, connect a Bluetooth device [2] to it and see the buttons inputs from a terminal [3]. You can also connect to the web Bluetooth interface [4] to take a look at the configuration.

To simply see the adapter in action you can look at my original Hackday Prize submission video [5].

[1] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro/wiki/Flashing-firmwa...

[2] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro/wiki/Controller-pair...

[3] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro/wiki/Getting-BlueRet...

[4] https://blueretro.io/

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj_Zbjb2_ms

I worked in a monorepo for the first 10 years of my career. That repo was pretty much a custom Linux distribution including userspace, various kernel version and various wireless drivers version. By the time I left the repo was close to 20 years old.

Due to all the legacy baggage this wasn't for sure the best example.

But I don't miss one bit being called to ssh on a machine to merge conflict in urgency to unblock some unknown project release. Nor the fear of blocking 1000+ dev if I f up somehow.

I personally sponsor:

Hector Martin: https://github.com/sponsors/marcan Apple M1 silicon RE & Linux port

Ryan C. Gordon: https://github.com/sponsors/icculus SDL lib maintainer

They make awesome work and look like decent human beings.

Another anecdote: I'm mostly doing embedded C and I always fail leetcode tests and get my jobs when the interviewers endup valuing more the conversation where I can easily talk about past experience about real world problem I solved or the many time I went to a factory floor debugging embedded system live.

I was working for startup company a few year ago that didn't had yet their leetcode process setup. This startup had an algorithm team working on signal processing and the embed team that pretty much took their python algo and translated them in either C or ASM for some special accelerator + the typical board bringup.

Before using leetcode with new candidate they asked for some volunteer in the team to try it out. I did the test and failed miserably as always. My boss called me to his office and told me, your one of my best guy but you did the worst in the test. I told him this test is probably good for hiring someone for the algo team but for embed it's not relevant at all to the kind of problem we work on.

My boss did some research and found a test targeted at embedded programming. I did the test and got best score in the team (equal with one teammate).

Test are good but you need the right one for the right position. Most of the time for embed job it's the wrong test.