Mar 05 2025 44 mins 40
John Taylor returns to the podcast to discuss his new book "The Embedded Project Cookbook", co-authored with Wayne Taylor. The book serves as a practical guide for embedded systems development, providing recipes and techniques that John has refined over his 30+ year career. Unlike his previous book "Patterns in the Machine" which focused on software engineering best practices, this new book takes a more hands-on approach to project mechanics - from requirements gathering through release.
The book provides opinionated guidance on setting up project infrastructure, managing requirements, software architecture, and release processes. While organized in a waterfall-like structure for clarity, it emphasizes the need for agility in embedded development. A key theme is establishing good practices early to make releases boring and predictable rather than chaotic.
The content is valuable for different roles - from junior developers seeking context about the full development lifecycle, to technical leads implementing processes, to managers needing justification for development infrastructure investments. While the book presents John's specific approaches, he emphasizes that teams can adapt the recipes to their needs as long as they deliberately address the underlying challenges.
Key Topics Discussed (Timestamps):
00:00:00 - Introduction and background on John Taylor
00:02:00 - Comparison to previous book "Patterns in the Machine"
00:06:00 - Target audience and use cases
00:15:00 - Software Development Plans and their value
00:20:00 - Foundation setup before coding begins
00:27:00 - Managing project variants and configurations
00:30:00 - Communication and collaboration practices
00:35:00 - Release management and ongoing development
00:40:00 - Iterative development cycles
00:43:00 - Book availability and contact information
Links:
Embedded Systems Cookbook: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/979-8-8688-0327-7
Patterns in the machine (the previous book): https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-6440-9
John's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-tanner-taylor/
You can find Jeff at https://jeffgable.com.
You can find Luca at https://luca.engineer.
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