tooling
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🔌 Bring your own AI
At a recent industry event, I learned about Lattice Prompt. This tool spins up a local MCP server. You can connect to it from any AI tool, such as Claude, which then drives the Lattice FPGA design tools. I like the approach Lattice took. Th…
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🔐 Simple secret management for small teams
Small teams need to keep secrets out of Git and out of plain-text files, but they rarely have the time to run secrets infrastructure. This article describes a practical way to manage secrets with reasonable security and low friction. Let’s …
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🔧 What has changed around edge build systems?
Reflecting on Embedded Linux/Edge build systems, several things have changed: ARM and RISC-V hardware is fast. Modern ARM boards and cloud instances (AWS Graviton, Hetzner CAX) build at speeds that make cross-compilation unnecessary for mo…
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🚀 How to make releases painless
In the olden days, releases were a lot of work. The process involved manually building/testing, uploading to a distribution location, sending out notifications to interested parties, etc. Supporting multiple platforms meant even more work. …
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🔗 Platform thinking does not mean we don't use other platforms
On the contrary, platform thinking readily embraces other tools and platforms. The difference is: We add our own tooling, integration, and workflows into the mix. We own the integration points so we can readily swap out/in 3rd party compon…
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🚀 Platforms are not just for developers
This is an interesting post from a Marketing person creating website pages: I built 19 website pages in a single day while my team was out for US thanksgiving. Not mockups. Not placeholders. Actual, shippable pages: a full partner ecosyste…
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📦 CDPD - Container Driven Product Development
When updating the Simple IoT documentation, the question arose - how to install mdbook and a few plugins? Of course pacman has part of what is needed. In the past cargo has been used, but that is slow and not a good fit for shared tools. Th…
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💻 Local First Dev
In the last couple decades, we’ve observed the success of SaaS web applications (Google Docs, Salesforce, Basecamp, Trello, etc.). These applications have unleashed collaboration using the web platform. Before this, users might have emailed…
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🥣 The two ingredients for agility
✔️ Low friction: tooling and workflows that allow anyone to make changes easily. (good build systems, clean libraries, release automation, etc.) ✔️ Confidence: what we are doing is not going to break things. (CI, end-to-end testing, review,…