Defense in Depth, When the Unexpected Happens
Cybersecurity usually starts at the periphery by blocking attack vectors. But what if the failure comes from the inside? An attacker needs both an exploitable weakness and a way to reach it. Firewalls, authentication, secure boot, access control, restricted physical interfaces and similar measures are designed to close those paths. That is essential. But it […]
Where Did Embedded Engineering Go?
Open almost any embedded systems news feed today and one topic dominates everything: generative AI. Where did the rest of engineering go? Generative AI: people promote it, criticize it, publish recipes, show what they generated in a few hours, warn about the risks, or explain why everyone else is using it incorrectly. Where are Linux, […]
Embedded Post-Quantum Security Starts Now
Think quantum computing is the next decade’s threat? Think again. If your hardware ships this year, it’s already a today problem. It’s easy to dismiss Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) as a problem for the 2030s. After all, RSA and ECC are not broken today, and cryptographically relevant quantum computers are still generally expected around the 2030 […]
Technical Debt: Are We Arguing About the Problem or the Name?
Recently, I have witnessed several surprisingly heated discussions about technical debt. Interestingly, the disagreement was rarely about how to reduce it, how much it costs, or how it affects engineering teams. In fact, the disagreement was often about whether the situation being discussed qualified as technical debt at all. In many cases, the objection came […]
Embedded Cartography: Architecture Beats Optimization
This second article continues a two-part story inspired by a real industrial project carried out for a railway OEM. The first article described how a classical OpenStreetMap rendering architecture was successfully deployed onboard embedded rolling stock. This second part explores how rethinking the rendering pipeline itself led to significantly better performance and efficiency. The first […]
The Market Clock Doesn’t Care About Your Delay
A one-month delay on a product development project is one more month of engineering costs and burn rate, right? Wrong. It is far more expensive than that. Embedded products live within two hard limits: project start, decided by the OEM end of commercial life, decided by the market The hard truth is the market clock […]
Embedded Cartography: Rising to the Challenge
This first article is inspired by a real industrial project carried out for a railway OEM. It describes the successful deployment of an OpenStreetMap rendering architecture on an embedded platform, with surprisingly good results given the modest hardware resources and the density of railway infrastructure data involved. A second article will explore how the original […]
How the CRA May Standardize Failure
The Cyber Resilience Act is supposed to improve the security of products sold in Europe. This contrarian article argues that the relationship between regulation and actual security is weaker than it appears. Compliance has a cost. It requires time, expertise, documentation, audits, and tooling. These are not marginal efforts. They shape how products are designed, […]
Rules Bind the Fool and Guide the Wise
In my professional life, I’m often described as strict. Sometimes even rigid. It’s rarely meant as a compliment. I understand why. In environments where everything moves fast, where constraints shift and problems evolve faster than they can be fully understood, anyone holding onto principles can look inflexible. As if they’re refusing to adapt. But that’s […]
The Vasa Didn’t Sink Because Engineering Failed
In 1628, the Swedish warship Vasa sank less than a mile into its maiden voyage. Engineering had identified and tested the problem. The instability had been demonstrated in plain sight, in front of those in charge. The failure came from a management system where that knowledge no longer had any leverage. The usual explanation for […]