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 were always shocked. Their own departments had hundreds of engineers. Of course, they made more types of hardware and had different requirements, but it was a validation that our work was worth it.

As my series of quests in the hardware world continued, slowly, over time, I visited hacker news less and less. Over time, it felt to me that only YCombinator or the silicon valley was relevant on it. I had these fond memories of reading and discovering new things but, I slowly outgrew it. It started to seem to me that it was more a community of startup hackers and not tech hackers, like I had initially thought. In itself, this was not surprising, the platform belonged to the biggest tech angel fund in the world.

Even personally, either with university friends or previous co-workers it was becoming harder and harder to explain and talk about my work. Because of the gigantic context model that was required to understand, it was almost like trying to stream a 4k movie through a pre-high speed internet line. I ended up instituting a personnel rule to not talk about work outside of work. Because the work was so intense, this helped me rest a bit.

I was digging my rabbit hole deeper and deeper. Greg had these unconventional ideas which I found amazing each time. Using and abusing standard components and connectors to do something different. He had used a PCI connector to pass power, network, SATA signals, UART and others instead of designing a custom connector. I was imitating this on the software part, hacking small software bridges to reuse a maximum of existing software components.
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Greg was carving his own path in the jungle. Hacking through whatever problem appeared. In a sense, the team was the support and logistics. The high level design would be done by Greg and the details would be implemented by the team as a whole. Over time this imprinted on me, it would reflect on so many of things I later did.

The tech world was going one path. We didn't care. We had problems to solve with specific constraints that very few people had. We solved those, not caring about the latest fashion unless it helped us solve an issue we were facing. Likely many other teams in the world were facing the same dilemma. Follow the crowd or do what was really needed. We, I chose to solve the problems we had.

The way I was accomplishing my work comforted my idea that only the engineering mattered. We were accomplishing what was needed and didn't care about the marketing or communication. Only the code mattered. Talk is cheap, show me the code (1) was my mantra. I would find out later that this approach was at best naive and would later feel the repercussions of some of the choices dictated by that approach. Until that time came, until I would slam into walls, it was the world, and us.

(1) Quote by Linus Torvalds

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To pair with :

• Maritime - Kenny Larkin
• One Piece series by Eiichiro Oda

If you have missed it, you can read the previous episode here​