2024 Review

2024 was much less exhausting than 2023. This year has been mostly smooth sailing, and taking time to do things I like, although there's a lingering feeling that I should be doing more. Let's go over it.

In March we had a company retreat to a cheese farm in the rural area of the state of São Paulo. This was nice, but I grew up in a much more rural area than the very industrialized state of São Paulo, so I wasn't that surprised to see things there!

However, it was all very thoughtful so I still appreciated the company and the food (and the cheese tasting sesh, which was delicious).

Technically, I was doing some Torizon-specific client work as well, of course I can't really talk about the specifics, but suffices to say I'm really impressed with the infrastructure we've built.

I was remotely testing software using our Remote Access feature as it's intended, and being able to connect to random machinery literally half a globe away and still do meaningful work on Airport WiFi is awesome.

March came fast and my trip to Europe was around the corner. Naturally, I had to pack some Chimarrão which resulted in one of the most hilarious pictures I've ever taken: chimarrão against the alps.

Like, fair, ok, it isn't the *most* scenic view I could find. I could've certainly done better, like taking my mate to the center of Luzern which is very scenic...

But anyhow I like that picture and here's how I packed it.

This, ironically, was my first ever trip taking a proper luggage. I adhere strongly to the "One Bag" principles, and travel fairly light. I have no idea why I did differently this time, I guess the luggage was just available. My short review is: I hate it. Seriously, fuck lugging stuff around. See my stupid luggage next to the lake.

Next time, One Bag again it is.

Okay, so I was in Switzerland and here's my honest Country Review: holy fucking shit. It's amazing. It's like Germany on steroids (read about me crying about living Germany here). So absurdly organized, so absurdly nice.

Something that struck me about the natural landscape is how warm it is. It's totally freaking weird to be wearing just a t-shirt and you look up and see snow-covered peaks. I'm pretty sure for the Alpine people this is normal but we simply don't have such sudden elevation changes in Brazil.

This is real place. lol. fuck off. :D

And I was very happy that my Germany skills were actually useful there, I could communicate with people just fine, although it's super weird to expect a "Danke" but actually get a "Merci".

And here's a hot take: it's easier for native speakers of Romance languages to learn German in Switzerland. Why? Because everything has French and Italian labels as well. EVERYTHING! So if you don't know what something means in German, French and Italian are there to help you.

Sadly Romansch seems to not be treated with the same level of respect, even the national railyway operator (yes I'm talking about trains, hang on a bit, I'm also shaking to write about it) only has the German, Italian and French acronyms for the name of the company:

Schweizerische Bundesbahnen (SBB)
Chemins de fer fédéraux suisses (CFF)
Ferrovie federali svizzere (FSS)

Switzerland, get the beautiful, awesome, just plain cool Viafiers federalas svizras (VFF) in there as well! Make me happy.

Ok, trains. Everyone at office and their mothers (with all due respect) told me to visit the Verkehrshaus der Schweiz aka the Musem of Transportation of Switzerland, and OF COURSE I obliged. Come on, I'm the train nerd, I had to go.

Overall, I had a blast, it's a super well-equipped museum. I learned a lot about the Cog-wheel Railways and about space stuff.

The only sad part is that I wasn't able to pilot one of the Stadler train simulators they have in there: a lot of kids were playing in it, which, in fairness, I understand, but I really wanted to play as well 🥲.

<~ RABe 514, from Siemens if I'm not mistaken.

Re 450 and RABe 514 ~>

Ich liebe dich, sympathischer, pünktlicher Zug 😘

Beer-wise, Switzerland is well served. I had mainly three types of beer there, this "Eichhof" which is local.

I've also had Quöllfrisch, which surprised me because where I lived in Germany Quöllfrisch only sold water.

Eichhof is better, Quöllfrisch is reeeeallly light. Even too much form me.

I've also engaged into some Gemar Beer shenigans. I was very happy to find Rothaus Tannenzäpfle in Luzern for cheap, which is by very very far my favorite beer of all time.

In Nürnberg I had whatever it was being sold at the family restaurant at that time, which seemed to be a very nice Weiss, possibly not related to the Nordbräu label on the cup.

Alright, cool, so, Embedded World is pretty insane. Pretty sure it's the biggest event I've ever been to, the halls are gigantic and there's a lot going on. I had little time to spent walking around because I was: 1) worried about my presentation and 2) talking to people about what I'm building.

It's certainly nice to get in-person feedback about the products I'm pushing to GitHub all the time, it finally clicked a lot of people depend on it, although, of course, we maintain them with this assumption from the beggining.

My presentation was ok, I gave myself a 7/10, being my first time and all. It's always somewhat daunting to come out in person to talk about tech, even though I've done several times, because most people have way more years of experience than I do.

Anyway, here's the slides just after finishing them up.

Regarding the topic, I haven't worked on it after giving the presentation, but a lot has happened in the cybersecurity and legislative spaces about it. I suggest you read more about it here, even if you're not interesting into our product, because it's a lot of free high-quality information.

Coming back to Brazil, in April I had MiniDebConf at Belo Horizonte. This was a smaller trip to a Brazilian state I've never been to and it was quite fun!

Food in Minas Gerais (the state) is excellent, and Belo Horizonte is a very beautiful city. The UFMG academic community made themselves very present and I had tons of interesting conversations.

Sadly during my presentation I got quite sick, I had to take some time to recover myself and it was hard to go through the end but I made it. I think it was a combination of the different (but excellent) food and the climate, which was quite hot at that time - I'm used to much more mild temperatures in the south, the heat just heats different as you go up the country.

Alright, work wise, I've made a lot of progress this year but I'm most proud of is the software testing setup we've developed.

Mainly, I did the design and 90% of the software implementation and one of the interns did the hardware setup and the other 10% of the software.

You can see the implementation of the job scheduler here. I called it "Aval" because it's "LAVA" backwards, but I regret the decision - frankly I was quite pissed with LAVA.

The thing itself is built on top of the Torizon Cloud API, which does most of the heavilifting, but nevertheless, we uncovered quite a few bugs by testing this way!

I was quite happy to have written a few technical articles this year, certainly not enough of them. But, one of them, "how does hardware acceleration work with containers?" got to the frontpage of HackerNews. It's awesome that somenthing technical I wrote got seen by quite a few people, even though the traction itself is small, I am an avid HN reader, so that made me happy anyway.

I'm also working on an articles series about software testing with practical examples. Here are the links, these are also related to my upcoming talks on Embedded World 2025 (this time, I got accepted for not only one, but TWO! So people might have liked mine from last year, I'm sure).

Embedded Software Testing: the Hardware-Software Interface (Part 1)

Embedded Software Testing: Practical Continuous Integration with Hardware in the Loop (Part 2)

Why bare-metal Debian (and Raspberry Pi OS) is not a good choice for most Embedded Systems

After this, the year slowed-down significantly and I just travelled around the state to see my grandparents twice. This year has been a lot of "staying put", really. The hard part of having such a cool event in the first months of the year is that you start with a very high point, which makes the rest a little bit less special.

Let's go over some of the objectives I traced for me last year and see if I was able to meet them

Technical stuff

Learn Rust for real: there are some applications I want to use Rust for and I'm done with C++.

Result: kind of! I was able to learn a lot about Rust and even made some commits to an internal Rust project plus an internal innovation project and some of Advent of Code 2023. I'm at a point where I know my way around Rust enough to probably ditch C++ and get the same level of productivity in about a month or two.

50%.

Write more technical blog-posts: I have some ideas in the backlog. I'm aiming for at least 6 medium-complexity articles or 2 in-depth ones.

Result: this totally happened with my three in-depth blogposts.

100%.

Prepare very very hard for my upcoming talk at Embedded World in April, in Nürnberg.

Result: hell yea, I went there and did the thing.

100%.

Learn way, way more about infrastructure, software reliability, and how I can help my juniors achieve their goals and be their best at what they want to do. I need to give something back to an industry that was really kind to me in terms of mentors.

I think I got this. As of today I've learned more about eBPF and have my mind really settled into infrastructure architectures.

80%.

Non-technical stuff

Bike at least 12-15km every day: I'd like to increase this number, if possible, but I'm being conservative.

This 100% did not happen. My city is simply to dangerous to bike in, I've barely done any biking. I started doing gym and really stayed in shape and healthy for a couple of months, but got tired out: it's boring. I need to be outside. This is something that has to change in 2025, but I'm not sure how.

0%.

Spend less time on social media: I need to stop infinite-scrolling. It's really not great for me, nor for anyone. Although it is a mechanism which I can keep in touch with people I love.

This was hard to do, although I'm picking up other hobbies for next year (photography, which I've been reading a lot about and already got a camera) which hopefully will help me out here.

50%.

Maybe get my driver's license? I feel conflicted about this one. I really hate driving, but it's kind of impossible when you're living in a state with mountains in between everything.

Still conflicted about this one. So, no percentage.

Keep reading: I read a book in a few hours in two sittings between yesterday and today and it feels GREAT!

I've read some nice books this year, but it's still hard to find time. I'm currently going over Moby Dick. I think I need to focus on shorter, non-fiction books to really get back at it.

So, I'd say I was able to do 60% of what I planned this year. Too ambitious, perhaps? Not sure, I think where I'm currently living is not ideal to lead life the way I want, so I'm planning to move in the future, which gets to the next big thing that happened this year.

Genealogy stuff: having an EU passport would be ass-kicking at this point in time, so I went around searching for my ancestor's documents to request my Italian blood to be recognized. I went a bit overboard with it and now I'm basically a half-expert on the Jus Sanguinis theme, and instead of just doing the necessary blood lines, I did all of then as far back as I could - in some cases until the early 1500s.

Suffices to say I'm much more "Italian" than I thought I was, basically all of my ancestors are Italian (if you consider those ethnically Italian in the Austro-Hungary Empire Italians) except a couple that was from Konstanz where I get my German surname from.

This was certainly pretty fun and I fully intend continuing my research on it to tie the loose ends.

That's it for 2024. A very quiet year. Hopefully, 2025 is a bit more rowdy. I already have another trip to Europe this next March and more is to be decided afterwards.

See you in 2025, cheers.

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