I am Mark Roszko. An Electrical Engineer/Embedded Systems Engineer but generally I do more than what my title entails. I started off doing web development while in high school for clients. I did my work primarily in PHP, Ruby (using Rails), JS, HTML, CSS. Over time and mostly in college I went into doing electrical engineering but more towards the embedded engineering spectrum.To me, just doing software alone got boring fast, sure if the projects are interesting I tend to do them anyway but hardware creates a whole other area of design.
The understanding of hardware and software design coupled together is what embedded engineering so much more exciting. You can have hardware bugs just as easily as software bugs. You may want to fix hardware issues with software. You may want to design hardware to make software easier to create. You may want to make software feature packed and so need the right hardware to support it.
I consider myself quite proficient in C. I have worked and designed with the AVR, PIC1s,PIC18, Cortex M0, Cortex M3 and Cortex M4 microcontrollers. I have also worked on the Cortex A5 microprocessor.
What do I do currently?
Right now I work professionally as an Electrical Engineer (by title). In reality I have done:
- Designed analog circuits for testing a safety product
- Designed embedded communication systems to convert between various protocols
- Reversed engineered closed communication protocols
- Developed an embedded linux battery charging platform. I did not do the design of the hardware but I did the hardware bringup and then the entirely of setting up a bootloader, customizing the kernel and creating various support applications to run the system alongside the main application.
- Solved production line issues and worked with workers to resolve problems in flow
- Managed internal company engineering IT such as servers for production, development (source control, issue tracking)
- I also contribute to the Linux kernel and a few other projects like KiCAD (C++). I am also currently running siggy, a service for players of EVE Online, a spaceship game. It has a bit of a following and sees 1k simultaneous users at peak every day. It’s been an evolving application developed solely by me over the last 4 years.
What is the purpose of this blog?
Just to catalog interesting tidbits as a go. Mainly code and bugs. Bugs are fun, If I post one it’s something that’s of note, something that could cause problems but isn’t immediately obvious or thought about, instead of more obvious bugs. Debugging is fun :D
Contact
mark.roszko[at]gmail.com