Splitting light Season 1 Episode 21 1+ meter track length If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe This next assignment was to become the premise of a career pivot even though I could not know it at the time. Greg has these interesting ideas that I can only fully appreciate now that I am much more experienced and more battle tested. He did the hardware designs in a modular way. There was a project to reuse the C1 node to package it as a raspberry pie but it...
11 days ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 20 Unable to show up on time to work If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe This episode talks about mental health, if this is a sensitive subject for you, feel free to skip. Alarm clock Coming out of adolescence and throughout my adult life I have had troubles with my sleep. Specifically waking up in the morning. One of the things I had loved the most at Epitech, the university I had gone to, was that it was open 24/7. You...
18 days ago • 4 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 19 The world, and us If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe C2 server racks I remember some higher ups of major hardware distributors and manufacturers visiting our office in Paris. Arnaud always kept the pleasure of showing off the lab to them. The small cramped room with its server room behind it. The six engineers and loads of open hardware laying around. He told them this was the full team that worked on the hardware. They...
25 days ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 18 C2 Launch If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Two years after I had joined the lab, the manufacturing orders for the second generation compute were sent. A few weeks later, they were being racked in the datacenter rooms and shortly after they were released for customer use. C2 chassis Finally, all the hours we had put in, all the hair we had lost, was worth it as the hardware hit production. I intimately knew a lot of the...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 17 Mission Statement If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Our job in the lab was to create new hardware and make it work. Then both dedicated team and cloud team would send an order depending on what they expected to sell, and we would support both throughout the lifetime of the hardware. This was our mission. Keeping this in mind was important. It was important because we could often get distracted from it. The important...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 16 Learning how to craft PCB If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe When I started my full time career five years earlier, I did not expect to work on hardware. It was something of the old times. My impressions were that hardware was packed away in a datacenter far far away never to be touched. When you think about it, this was always the case. Servers had always been far away, and there were a lot of reasons why it was. École 42...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 15 Safe haven If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe For as long as I can remember, music has always been a component of me. I had binged all the music I could get hands on since I was a teenager. I had music in headphones at work or in the metro. At home music was playing endlessly day and night. I had started with hip hop and metal. My old flatmate introduced me to electronic music, which was my bread and butter. As I met...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 13 1st generation network equipment If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe 1st generation network equipment Building computer hardware is an interesting business. The entry price is horrendous. It takes months of careful planning before you can get any physicaldevices out. Of course, the physical device is not enough. You also need all kinds of software for it to work. The First generation required two firmwares, two Linux and a...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 13 Adding sidecar software If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe The C1 server could not be used by the bare metal team. The nodes had little memory and no local disk. The C2 did not have these constraints and from the beginning it was designed to be used by both the cloud and bare metal teams. If both teams used the devices, that meant we produced more of them and it also meant the R&D cost could be spread on more devices. The...
2 months ago • 3 min read