This page is a private blog operated by Daniel Glaser alias themole.
I’m an embedded engineer with a diploma degree in electrotechnics from the universitiy of Erlangen-Nuremburg. Through this study time, I put a focus on embedded systems (hardware and software), VHDL and especially open source. All the time of my professional life, I more and more realized, that software is a big part of my profession (beside electronics) and I took a lot of effort trying to get best in class not only for the practical skills, also for the theoretical background on how software can be developed with a high quality in mind.
Engineering embedded systems in a small- to mid-sized company sometimes means, that you are the only guy that understands the systems in a whole, especially, if your company’s main business is not the development of embedded systems. If you do not addict to clean code and good documentation, anybody that will follow you is totally lost, even if it is you, not touching the project for some weeks. Not even thinking about having an accident, retiring or leaving the company.
For me, the case was clear. I need to improve my situation by improving my skills on clean software. Therefore, I bought some books about agile frameworks, test driven development, continuous integration, clean code development, patterns and other related stuff. My existing knowledge on different fields (IT, SW, HW,…) was helpful to sort all this stuff into a larger context. When I tried to implement all these in an automated process (because doing it manually just makes no fun), I only found little pieces that did not fit together very well.
This is, why I started this blog. Putting the pieces together, collecting the stuff that whirrs around in the web and being a place where others can have a look, if they plan to do the same, need arguments for it or simply need some assitance.
Additionally, I’ll document my private projects, just in case I want to get up to speed again, when I need to dig into it years later and also to spread the knowledge on how to solve common problems with electronics, firmware, software,… just tindering…
The Nickname
Just in case, anybody wonders about my nickname „themole“. During my university time, I was one of the IT administrators of the dormitory I lived in. Since the university blocked most of the traffic in both directions, one of my hobbies soon got SSH-tunneling. I really got experienced in chaining SSH tunnels and even faking DNS entries to make applications working through the tunnels… Soon the IT team called me „Der Maulwurf“ which is simply the german word for that little digging animal. Surely, tunneling diggs security holes, but an experienced digger knows how to keep the static integrity of an IT building or even enforces it by such tunnels 😉