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Inside Sh!tty Hacks: An Anti-Hackathon at CU Boulder
As the summer waned in 2025, CU professor Zack Weaver and I brainstormed ideas over lunch in Longmont, Colorado. We were looking for ways to increase student engagement in the ATLAS BTU makerspace, and pretty quickly landed on the idea of hosting a hackathon…but not a typical one. To differentiate ourselves from the other hackathons…
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How I’d Teach Embedded AI Without Overwhelming Students
In December, I had an eye-opening conversation with Prof. Rahul Mangharam at the University of Pennsylvania about the challenges of teaching embedded AI to undergraduate students. That discussion prompted me to reflect on how we, as instructors, design curriculum that balances accessibility with depth. What follows is a set of thoughts on how embedded AI…
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How Long It Actually Takes to Become Productive with a New Microcontroller
Why This Question Keeps Coming Up One question I hear from firmware engineers (and one that I often ask myself) is: “How long should it take to get productive on a new microcontroller?” The frustration behind that question is usually familiar: you understand the basics of controlling GPIO, writing to registers, scheduling interrupts, DMA, RTOS,…
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Building in the Gaps: Lessons from an Apple Firmware Engineer
Parth Thakkar’s journey is a reminder that landing a coveted engineering job at a renowned hardware company isn’t built on credentials alone. It’s built on curiosity, persistence, and an almost stubborn commitment to learning by doing. Today, Parth is a HID Firmware Engineer at Apple, working on the embedded code that powers the next generation…
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State of Edge AI on Microcontrollers in 2026
Over the past couple of years, edge AI on microcontrollers (often called “TinyML”) has evolved beyond demos and conference talks. You can now find professional tools, workflows, and design patterns used to ship real products. While this progress has not seen the explosive visibility of other cloud AI paradigms (e.g. large language models), the embedded…
