Years ago, we were building an embedded vehicle tracker for commercial vehicles. The hardware used an ARM7 CPU, GPS, and GPRS modem, running uClinux.

We ran into a tricky bug in the initial application startup process. The program that read from the GPS and sent location updates to the network was failing. When it did, the console stopped working, so we could not see what was happening. Writing to a log file gave the same results.

For regular programmers, if your machine won't boot up, you are having a bad day. For embedded developers, that's just a typical Tuesday, and your only debugging option may be staring at the code and thinking hard.

This board had no Ethernet and only two serial ports, one for the console and one hard-wired for the GPS. The ROM was almost full (it had a whopping 2 MB of flash, 1 MB for the Linux kernel, 750 KB for apps, and 250 KB for storage). The lack of MMU meant no shared libraries, so every binary was statically linked and huge. We couldn't install much else to help us.

A colleague came up with the idea of running gdb (the text mode debugger) over the cellular network. It took multiple tries due to packet loss and high latency, but suddenly, we got a stack backtrace. It turned out `printf()` was failing when it tried to print the latitude and longitude from the GPS, a floating point number.

A few hours of debugging and scouring five-year-old mailing list posts turned up a patch to GCC (never applied), which fixed a bug on the ARM7 that affected uclibc.

This made me think of how the folks who make the space probes debug their problems. If you can't be an astronaut, at least you can be a programmer, right? :-)

Here is a full example: https://github.com/cogini/phoenix_container_example/blob/mai...

See https://github.com/cogini/phoenix_container_example for a full example. This blog post describes it in detail: https://www.cogini.com/blog/breaking-up-the-monolith-buildin...

Lack of MMU caused some unexpected issues:

* Because there is no MMU, there are no shared libraries. All the binaries have to be statically linked. We had a total of 2MB of ROM, of which about 1M was the Linux kernel. So we ran out of space for the programs we needed for the application about 3/4 of the way through the project. The solution was to use Lua, which was a 200k binary, and it could run scripts to do some things.

* Lack of MMU means no memory protection between programs. One program can step on another program's memory. Just like the good old days of DOS. Ouch!

* We started with the ucLinux distribution, which is pretty lame. A lot of programs in the tree didn't build. We ended up rebuilding with Yocto, and making patches to things where necessary.

* We found other entertaining bugs: https://www.cogini.com/blog/debugging-your-space-probe/

My daughter's data engineering team in finance was reduced from five to two, and they are not giving raises that match inflation. She is almost singlehandedly responsible for servicing million-dollar accounts. It's not like there isn't money.

There is also a lot of hiring of remote people outside the US. The companies figured out how to do remote work during Covid, and they are using it to reduce costs.

Things will probably improve in the next year, but it will be rough for a while.

Contrast this with languages like Java where every object is a potential concurrency problem. Or the 10+ years of trying to make Python async (see Twisted).

I don't know what the equivalent GCP spend would be to get similar treatment. Presumably higher. So that's a data point, at least.

A branch can repatriate profits to the parent company, after paying Taiwan tax. If you have a standalone Taiwan company, then you have to pay dividends, then pay personal tax on it. If you are not resident in Taiwan, then you would pay 20% tax on those dividends. There is also a 5% tax on retained earnings.

Another benefit is that if your company pays someone overseas for services, then Taiwan considers that "Taiwan source income", and they owe 20% tax on it. Other countries like Hong Kong would not tax that money.

As foreigner, if you leave, then you would find it difficult to run your company remotely. So you might as well set up somewhere else.

It used a magic cable that talked to the meters using RS-232 and converted the data into audio, plugging into the audio jack on the phone.

So, basically, it was a modem. The cable just had a little bump on it that did everything you used to do with a huge device.

While companies can enforce their trademarks, it's generally better to allow people who are using domains in a reasonable way to continue. Taking the domain away and then doing nothing with it doesn't benefit anyone.

Even in parasitical scenarios, allowing squatters to get affiliate revenue by redirecting traffic to the company is better than fooling around with the legal process.

The dev team keeps getting yanked around and interrupted. So every two weeks you get all the business people in a room and you have them make a list of things that the dev team will work on this cycle. Then the dev team can execute in peace. The Scrum Master's job is to protect the dev team. The Product Owner's job is to get the business people to converge on the prioritized list of work.

In a healthy organization, Scrum is much less useful. Scrum combines three different cycles: defining work, executing work, and reviewing work. In a flow-based process like Kanban, you can split them up.

The product manager builds a prioritized backlog of work, and the dev team estimates tasks to help do business ROI calculations. It's a collaboration between product and development.

The dev team implements tasks from the backlog one by one. You can batch up work to make a release, deliver incrementally, or use tools like feature flags. You evaluate whether features are effective working based on metrics.

The result is images the same size as Alpine, or smaller, without the incompatibilities. I think Alpine is a dead end.

When the mowers are cheap, it's rational. They get the lawnmower out of the shed the first time in spring and it won't start, it would cost a significant amount to get it fixed, and they have to waste your time and wrestle a dirty lawnmower in and out of your car. So they buy a cheap new one and throw the old one away.

Paying someone is still more expensive than doing it yourself.