I remember being blown away at the quality of people at Silicon Labs. At that time, the company felt more like a startup than I had expected, and I believed HR when they told me about the quality of the employees. I still remember some of my colleagues from Silicon Labs. I made friends with Roy Stracovsky, Cole Thompson, Quinn Buoy, and Leigh Gonik.
Roy had recently won several high profile high school science fair competitions, and got to meet the governor of Texas as a result. Roy had a talent for juggling and the dexterity to quickly empty a bowl of marbles with chopsticks. We talked about compilers, and how he had home-brewed a forth runtime. I was so intrigued that he had made a CPU as part of his high-school curriculum.
Cole and Quinn were both great mentors of mine. Cole was a great software engineer with knowledge of embedded systems who was coming up on the end of his bachelors degree. He motivated me to become a leader in IEEE RAS, and to write better software. Quinn was a younger more driven man than Cole, I remember Quinn had ambitions of climbing the ladder and starting a business. It was Quinn who Introduced me to Prof. Mark McDermott in my freshman year. Cole and Quinn helped me achieve more during my time at UT.
Despite the people I was eager to work somewhere else. I remember being shocked that I was paid 14 dollars an hour, after the interviewer stating I would get in the 30 dollar range as an intern. Despite the fact I did engineering work for the CAD/Foundry Teams; Silicon Labs pay scale and the fact I had not taken In Residence classes at UT yet meant that was what I would be paid. Although unjustified, I remember feeling personally betrayed. I worked very hard to get a better job somewhere else, somewhere closer to the silicon.
Microarchitecture is Yale Patt's signature class and widely considered the hardest course offered by the department. But is it the best place to learn CPU design, when the assignment makes you balance design complexity and tooling development against a... Read More
Sometimes I look at my sisters cat and wonder what he can understand. My sister's cat is named Boba. He is a good sort of fellow, well behaved, polite... endlessly hungry. Often, I look at him and wonder what he sees. Of course his vision is different ... Read More
Fundamentally, engineering is just about choosing whats best. The hard part is just figuring out what is best. Getting caught up in my regrets used to feel like progress. After all, introspection is the first step to improvement. While important, intro... Read More
How I learned to let go of small things like ‘value proposition’, ‘opportunity cost’ and ‘reason’ in order to embrace the transistor. In the later half of my internship at AMD in 2019, I was struck by the Muse. I had just seen the Monster 6502, which i... Read More
Being clear about what you mean is a skill, but being clear while avoiding accountability for the consequences is a profession Everybody knows that lying is wrong. Or at the very least, that lying too much will get you in trouble. Everybody also knows ... Read More
This is a simple tool that I made to strip HTML out of transcripts I was copying and pasting. I also occasionally run into situations where there are many superscripts and it gets tedious to remove them all by hand. Just note that the tool is a little ... Read More
A colleague sent me a link. Hours later, I was still deep in a rabbit hole of assembly, auto-vectorization, and benchmarking GCC vs. Clang. One of my long time colleagues Brendan sent me a link that you can view HERE. Naturally, I opened it as soon as ... Read More
