Hello, world (still)

I wrote my first Hello, world in 1980 on a MicroAce 8-bit computer. I soldered all the chips on the board, put it all together and fired it up. I love bringing hardware to life and making it do fun things. Many years later the languages have changed, the hardware has changed, the budgets have certainly changed — but the loop is the same: pick a hard problem, build the simplest thing that could possibly solve it, watch it survive contact with reality, repeat.

I’m starting this blog because the most interesting work I’ve ever done lives in places nobody outside the program ever sees: flight software dropped into a sealed box, an AI agent quietly rebuilding a rack at 3am, a scheduling algorithm that has been running unattended for fifteen years. I want a place to write about the craft of those systems — not the press-release version, the actual engineering version — and to think out loud about where software for hard environments is going next.

What you can expect here:

• Notes on flight software, embedded systems, and the strange engineering culture they grow inside.
• What I’m learning building AI-driven operations at DartNode, in plain language.
• Open-standard space infrastructure (the ip.space project).
• Occasionally, a war story.

The bar I’m setting for myself is “useful to one engineer somewhere.” If a post clears that bar, it ships. If it doesn’t, it stays in the drafts folder. Thanks for reading.

— Don