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Today, we’ll look at two over-the-air transmission use cases that each spawned three different protocol standards. I’ll include some pattern observations concerning the two sets. First, the obligatory XKCD. The two domains we’ll be analyzing are Ham radio digital voice and first-person-view drone video feeds. Both of these existed in analog form, and then digital alternatives came out and started gaining adoption. Ham Radio Digital Voice Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) D-STAR Yaesu System Fusion (YSF) Analog predecessor: Frequency Modulation (FM) D-STAR was the first of the main three digital voice modes by a long shot, starting development back in the 1990s....

I’ve been following Will Larson for a while at this point. I read his book Staff Engineer, listened through the associated podcast, , follow his blog, and listened to his talk on strategy. I was excited to see his interview pop up on Lenny’s podcast recently. Then, I heard Lenny’s interview with Richard Rumelt and thought Richard had a straightforward, practical approach to thinking about strategy. It’s interesting tracing the lineage of ideas - Richard Rumelt’s mental model was similar to what I had heard from Will Larson....

In my time off between Christmas and New Year, I generally read a book. Two great non-tech books I’ve read in past years are Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World and The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War on Oleg Gordievsky. Both of those were gifts from my brother. This year’s book was The Software Engineer’s Guidebook by Gergely Orosz. I am a reader of his newsletter, The Pragmatic Engineer....

My sister got me the Grecian Computer Brainteaser Puzzle for Christmas. My first thought was: “Should I write a program to brute force it or go the cryptanalysis route to find a weakness?” After a bit of playing, I didn’t expect to have the time I would need to look into the positional relationships to the level necessary for a manual solution. I then pivoted to think about how I would solve it programmatically....

I was thinking about how to best chronicle my career so far showcasing the variety of contributions I have delivered. After pondering, I came up with the idea of a graph showing my focus between the areas of software, data, cloud, and security. I had the look I wanted in mind but wasn’t sure how to implement it. My first concept was a stacked bar graph with variable width bars depending on my time in the position....

I have always been a nerd. As a kid, my first three big purchases with my own money were a pair of binoculars, Motorola walkie-talkies, and rechargeable batteries to power them. My brother and I played with those for years - at the house, at the park, and in many other settings. My introduction to ham radio was by reading Hardy Boys novels, including The Short-Wave Mystery. I also met someone who worked at Trans World Radio and showed me his mobile radio setup that could talk with South America....

This is the last post chronicling the reading of the book Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini. The first was an introduction and question of influence vs. persuasion, and the next covered the first four “weapons of influence”: contrast, reciprocation, commitment plus consistency, and social proof. Continuing on, here we cover liking, authority, and scarcity. Chapter 5: Liking It is better to be liked than not liked. Surprise! But what types of liking are there?...

Previously I shared a post Staff Engineer Resources that included a collection of books, podcasts, and blogs I found helpful. That list was a snapshot in time, but I wanted to create a living page to track my reading. Both improving my writing and increasing my book reading are personal improvement goals of mine. I like the “Reading,” “Read,” and “To Read” sections in Goodreads, but wanted a book list that fit the look and feel of the site more than their embedded widget....

In a microservices environment where services align to team boundaries, many times it will be necessary to call a service owned by another team. My team is responsible for the customer-facing external API layer for B2B transactions. We maintain multiple versions of MISMO APIs and handle security, logging, monitoring, and mapping the customer request to a standardized data format for our internal APIs. The APIs we are fronting do a lot of work....

Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini covers some useful and intriguing psychological constructs that shape how we act in society. As I mentioned in my previous post, one must take care in applying ethics to the situation and analyzing which subset of tactics is acceptable. Below I walk through the book by chapter highlighting topics and examples that I found interesting. Chapter 1: Weapons of Influence One theme this book exposes is the subconscious things we would be surprised influence us but actually do....