# Christmas Special

- Show: [The Pragmatic Embedded Podcast](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-pragmatic-embedded-podcast)
- Published: 2021-12-22
- Length: 39m
- Page: https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-pragmatic-embedded-podcast/2021-12-22-christmas-special
- Listen: https://agileembeddedpodcast.com/episodes/christmas-special-eWWDIWd8

## Summary

Hosts Jeff Gable and Luca share war stories from their careers in embedded systems, highlighting the pain of manual testing in helicopter avionics, the chaos of managing requirements with Word and Excel in Dropbox for medical devices, and the technical debt of massive #ifdef blocks in legacy machine tool software. They discuss the industry's slow adoption of modern software practices like version control and CI/CD, contrasting embedded development with web development standards. The episode concludes with book recommendations including 'The Phoenix Project' and 'Team Topologies', and reflections on the future of IoT security and agile adoption in hardware.

## Chapters

- [0:00](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-pragmatic-embedded-podcast/2021-12-22-christmas-special#t=0) Introduction and War Stories: Helicopter Avionics Testing
- [9:14](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-pragmatic-embedded-podcast/2021-12-22-christmas-special#t=554) Legacy Code and Version Control Nightmares
- [12:53](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-pragmatic-embedded-podcast/2021-12-22-christmas-special#t=773) Requirements Management Failures in Medical Devices
- [20:18](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-pragmatic-embedded-podcast/2021-12-22-christmas-special#t=1218) 2021 Retrospective: Personal and Business Updates
- [28:04](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-pragmatic-embedded-podcast/2021-12-22-christmas-special#t=1684) Industry Predictions: IoT, Security, and Agile Adoption
- [34:26](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-pragmatic-embedded-podcast/2021-12-22-christmas-special#t=2066) Book Recommendations: The Phoenix Project and Team Topologies

## Topics

- [Debugging & failure analysis](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/topic/debugging-and-failure-analysis)
- [Embedded firmware](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/topic/embedded-firmware)
- [Leadership, teams & culture](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/topic/leadership-and-culture)
- [Security & privacy](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/topic/security-and-privacy)
- [Careers & education](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/topic/engineering-careers-and-education)

## Most relevant to

established companies, companies scaling up

## Mentioned

- NH 90 (product)
- Motorola 68K (chip)
- Subversion (tool)
- Simulink (tool)
- Stateflow (tool)
- Matlab (tool)
- MathWorks (company)
- CVS (tool)
- Dropbox (tool)
- DOORS (tool)
- The Phoenix Project (product)
- Team Topologies (product)
- Modern Embedded Systems Programming (product)
- Test-Driven Development for Embedded C (product)

## Related episodes from other shows

- [53: Being a Grownup Engineer (Repeat)](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/embedded-fm/2016-09-28-53-being-a-grownup-engineer-repeat) (Embedded.fm)
- [191: What, Yogurt!?!](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/embedded-fm/2017-03-15-191-what-yogurt) (Embedded.fm)
- [53: Being a Grownup Engineer](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/embedded-fm/2014-05-28-53-being-a-grownup-engineer) (Embedded.fm)
- [418: Answer Me These Questions Three](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/embedded-fm/2022-06-23-418-answer-me-these-questions-three) (Embedded.fm)
- [243: Pick a Good One](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/embedded-fm/2018-04-27-243-pick-a-good-one) (Embedded.fm)

## Citing this page

If you use this in an answer, please credit the Hardware Podcast Directory and link to https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-pragmatic-embedded-podcast/2021-12-22-christmas-special. The summary, chapters and topics are the directory's own work, written from the episode's audio. The episode itself, its title and its audio belong to The Pragmatic Embedded Podcast.