Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Post-Vacation Update

It seems I have not posted in about 1 month.  We are in a critical phase of the project at work and my evenings have largely been consumed by my day-job responsibilities.  I also took some vacation.

Since the last post, I have been playing around with a few ideas.  No concrete idea for my pet project yet.  I also read the two books I wrote about here, I have also re-opened The Developer's Code - What Real Programmers Do.  Great book, highly recommended.  The author does an outstanding job of condensing years of experience and wisdom into 50 small essays about software development.

Essay 17 in that book struck a chord with me.  The essay is titled: "Just Say "No" to the Pet Project".  Here's a great quote from is: "Pet project fail when there are no time constraints and nothing is on the line if we don't succeed".  Certainly food for thought...

One idea I had was to revisit buildroot scripts to generate an embedded Linux system and run the system on my MIPS CPU design.  I was almost successful with this years ago, but dropped the idea because it wasn't a needed for the work I was doing at the time.  I am interested in seeing how the scripts have evolved over the years.  I did try running the buildroot scripts running on Cygwin but faced issues.  I could have used a Linux virtual machine, but instead went ahead and bought some parts to put together an inexpensive Linux box / home file server.  The parts should be arriving later this week.

More later ...