Hardware Podcasts

395: I Can No Longer Play Ping Pong

Embedded.fm · 10 Dec 2021 · 1h 17m · Episode 395

What this episode covers

Tyler Hoffman, co-founder of Memfault, explains how his team at Pebble and later Fitbit transformed firmware development by standardizing developer environments, optimizing build systems, and automating debugging. He details the shift from slow, sequential IAR builds to parallel GCC builds using Make and Conda, which reduced build times from 18 minutes to 2 minutes. Hoffman also describes building web applications and GDB Python scripts to enable remote debugging of field crashes without physical debuggers. The discussion highlights the importance of dedicated developer productivity roles and the evolution of tools from one-off scripts to robust, company-wide platforms.

Most relevant to

companies scaling up

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Memfault, Pebble, Fitbit
Tools
IAR, GCC, Conda, Invoke, fzf, GDB, Eclipse, VS Code, CppUTest, ESP-IDF, Zephyr, Nordic SDK

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