One month turned into two months. After writing an especially weird piece of code that had turned my brain into mush. I looked at the blade, an assembly of metal, components and PCB layers. I was getting tired. I pushed it in hoping this was going to be the end but the LEDs stayed red. My hope sank. There was a sense of despair.

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This was blocking the manufacturing order. The support engineer had a call with me. We zoomed out of the issue. I explained to him the big picture. How we had connected the chips together. He asked for some more details. He eventually told me that what we wanted to do was not possible.
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We had interpreted the high level chip documentation wrongly when the board had been designed. We both brainstormed to find a solution. Every suggestion was not doable without changing the PCB and the months of qualification afterwards. This, in turn, would delay the manufacturing and the launch of the cloud platform.
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We ended our call, I put down the phone and turned to the side to debrief with Greg. I explained the assumptions and went through all the suggestions, one by one, to make sure I had not forgotten something.
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He interrupted me and told me that one of the solutions might actually be doable. We had a secondary network for telemetry and we would hijack part of it to accomplish our goal. I started making a list of all the things that were required to be changed.
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I fired up my code editor and started doing the edits. For each edit I would quickly test that it was working as expected. One part of the solution was intimidating because it required writing a device driver. By looking at the operating system code, I was able to write the code.
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After a few days, I had all the elements in hand. Every software that needed to be modified was ready. I upgraded the software everywhere, pushed in blade by blade.

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All the LEDs were green. The last was one in my hands. I slid it in. I watched the LEDs. I anxiously watched the diagnostics scrolling on my laptop. The LED turned orange. I stopped breathing and my heart stopped. A few seconds later it turned green. It worked. It worked!
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I was able to fix the problem. I told Greg, he sent the manufacturing order. We were finally going to be able to move on. Over the next week, I tested many combinations and edge cases to make sure we handled every possible situation.
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The dopamin hit was very good. I was proud that I had been able to navigate this issue. It was my trial by fire. It forced me to go through every part of the project. It would set the tone of what the next few years were going to be.
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A large portion of the work we did was custom. No documentation existed on the internet. If someone else on the planet had the same issue, they would certainly not ask a question on a forum. We were by ourselves. We had to figure out almost everything by ourselves. This was the way.

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

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To pair with :

• Louder - Jose Amnesia, Jennifer Rene
• A fire upon the deep by Vernor Vinge