I’m celebrating 9 months at Akiles, and wanted to share an update on what I’ve been up to and how it’s going, sort of a self-evaluation, or performance review as it’s called at “BigCorp”.
Meeting the team
I’ve been lucky to meet my team in Barcelona at two occasions: once in January for a company meeting, and once in March for a team building event at Port Aventura outside of Barcelona.
I also realized I am no longer the young one in the team. There was at least one occurrence of where I had to express “You go have fun on that ride, I will keep still at the ground” at Port Aventura.
Life at a “startup”
When do you stop calling a startup for a startup? I don’t know, but working at a small company is certainly different from what I was used to. I think what I’ve enjoyed most is the ability to focus more on my work with less disruptions, even if there is occasionally something that needs my attention.
One downside of being remote in a small team, is that it is harder to connect with co-workers and a feeling of belonging in a company. However, I think this is something we will have to learn by building a culture for remote work. I’m lucky to be part of an inclusive team where everyone is interested in making the work place even greater.
Technicalities
On the technical side, I’ve been engaged in developing a major feature and changes in the foundations for our products.
One was the ability for a third party device (phone) to deliver configuration updates to an offline device, which required changes to both firmware, backend and the mobile app. Another was to train a neural net to estimate battery capacity.
For a good part of my time, I’ve been working on trouble, a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) host stack in Rust that runs on multiple controller implementations (though my primary focus is Nordic nRF). I’ve gotten positive feedback on that, and others in the community are showing interest and contributing fixes. I will write more about trouble in a future post.
In April I also presented my Watchful PineTime smart watch firmware at RustNL 2024, which was a great experience. RustNL was arranged in Delft, a beautiful city in the Netherlands where I studied in the spring of 2009, so I got to revisit some nice places. At the conference, I was also lucky to meet a lot of people from the Embedded Rust community. There is a recording of my talk if you want to know more.
Summary
All in all it feels like I’ve learned a ton of new things since I joined Akiles. I think the coolest thing I’ve experienced here is the short path from implementation to production, for good and bad. It means I can very easily wreak havoc, but at the same time seeing firmware with code I wrote rolling out to all the devices gives a nice feeling. I’m looking forward to meet the team again, and the new things I’ll be working on going forward, so stay tuned for more.