YII Presentation
Company: ARM Ltd
Team: mbed (SDD)
Role: Software Engineer
2012-2013
By Tharshan Muthulingam
CSE Student by day, Developer by night
Contents
- Who are ARM?
- Who are mbed?
- What did I do?
- Problems Solved
- Lessons Learned
- Benefits
- Work Samples
- Questions?
ARM?
- Advanced RISC Machines
-
Their business is processors and support tools
-
They license their ARM architecture, for lots of $$
- Cortex M series, A series
- like x86 but reduce instruction set (RISC), so low power.
- If you have a modern device - smartphones or tablets
- 90% chance it has an ARM chip inside.
- many divisions.
WHERE DID I WORK?
- mbed (SDD)
- Their business is microcontrollers
- Similar to Arduino
- Low Power, C/C++ SDK, Professional Community
- mbed.org is a service for users of the hardware
- online compiler, version control, QnA, forums, Wiki
- biggest advantage of mbed is no setup required, its plug and play.
- Team of 8 people
Microcontrollers
What DID I do?
- Title - Software Engineer (Intern)
- Worked on mbed.org, utilising python, Django, linux etc
- Created several major features independently:
- QnA app similar to StackOverflow
- Internal Server Dashboard
- Pull Request Mechanism
- Test Infrastructure
- Supervision for new designer
- 30% New Features, 70% Maintenance
- Brief Stint as embedded engineer
- Working with mbed SDK using C/C++
- Other stuff I had no clue about
MBED
Problems and Solutions
- Fresh eyes on problems, usually yields better results
- Tasks that required me to rework parts of the system
- Popularity metrics of libraries and programs
- Testing critical code
- Improve community interaction
- New features
- Competitions (japan mbed hackathon)
- Scaling
- Consistency in design and code style
Lessons
- Go on time
- Ask questions, but also learn to work independently
- Track tasks and time, and work to schedule
- 2 Week Sprints
- Big companies like meetings
- Scrum meeting everyday at 11am
- Suggest ideas, but be prepared to take responsibility
- Always bearing in mind that users are important
- Keeping UI simple, so UX is pleasant
- Test properly
- as a user not developer
Social
- nice workplace
- cambridge is friendly and lively place
- cycled to work
- winter fare, food festival etc
- pub lunches and occcasional outings
- company fair every year
- sports clubs
-
in house gym
Benefits
- Great Environment and Culture. Interesting Work. Great people.
- Working with smart(er) people
- Chance to test the waters
- Networking
- Possibility of doing something unexpected
- Third year project - Simulating a Microcontroller
- nothing beats experience (in this line of work anyway)
- no exams, no coursework. just lots of fun - well kinda.
Testing infrastructure
internal Server Dashboard
Project proposal
Pull Requests
Q&A
Questions?
YII Presentation by Tharshan
By Tharshan Muthulingam
YII Presentation by Tharshan
YII Presentation by Tharshan
