Welcome

Welcome to my blog, "Commented Out", where I tell stories of product development, finding bugs, solving electronics design problems and generally looking at embedded firmware development and deployment.

I've gained experience across a few technologies in my career so far, but electronics and software is a fast growing field which can quickly leave you behind if you don't make an effort to keep up. So I am entering a period of retraining.

I'm also going to be using this blog as a way of documenting my progress during my retraining period. I'll be learning a range of different technologies and keeping notes here which I hope will be helpful to others as they start out on the same path, or at least be something for me to look back on as I learn.

In some posts, I'll cover subjects which are already covered elsewhere on the internet. My reasons are

• my post brings together the different sources I have found in one place for reference
• my blog forms a notebook for me to find answers in future (as does Scott Hanselman as he says in the first line of this post).
• by forcing myself to document and disseminate these topics, I'm improving my own understanding
• my post might help someone to see the topic from a slightly different angle, and sometimes that is enough for it to click with them.

At this point, I'm not going to list which technologies will be included, so you should check back regularly to see if there is one you are interested in, or subscribe to the RSS feed. Posts will be tagged appropriately so you will be able to easily group posts by topic. It has taken me a while to work out a way to do blogging without spending hours learning web development, but I am not going to go into details of how this blog works in this post. Maybe in a future post, once I find out that it all works.

So there will be a mixture of posts looking back at previous work, and posts looking forward at technologies which are new to me, and might be new to you. Hopefully you can learn something here.

No ads, no trackers, no push notifications, no newsletter, no popups.

The purpose of this blog is stated above, it is not a commercial blog trying to earn money from web traffic by hosting ads. So there is no third party code or scripts to infect your computer and no interruptions to your browsing experience.

Any mentions or recommendations of products are because I have either purchased them myself or I have heard about them from their users, not because their vendor wanted to promote them.

Reproducing articles from this site

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Yes, I am aware that Jeff Atwood said it isn't a blog if it doesn't have comments. And in many cases the comments are the best part of a blog. But that was before the rise of the smartphone which allowed many to be online anytime, when comments took over the internet, before the laws changed making hosts liable for displaying public comments.

So if you have a substantial comment that might benefit others, start a thread on Hacker News and I will link to it here. If you want to comment on this site as a whole, you may add a comment at FindYourBlog. If you just want to make a correction, send me email. If it requires several paragraphs and a diagram or two, post it on your own blog and let me know. If it's small enough to fit in in Tweet, do that. But this space is my blog and I am under no obligation (no, not freedom of speech) to host random spam.