Embedded experts talk!

Time for another Embedded Systems Belgium meetup! Rombit has been so nice to provide a location and food this time. Thank you Rombit!

The goal is to organize conferences, training, and presentations of personal projects related to embedded systems. You will also have the opportunity to enjoy a relaxing moment around a drink/pizza with others embedded enthusiasts.
Let's exchange thoughts, ideas, knowledge and projects about our passion!

The agenda will be the following one:

1. Free food & drinks

2. Short introduction by the host Rombit

3. First speaker:
   Gerwin Dox on using Rust on embedded platforms

"While C is still the dominant language on embedded systems, it does have its flaws, and as an alternative Rust could be used. Even though it is a young language and is not yet supported on many systems, it does have quite a few advantages to be considered for future projects.
This short talk will mostly focus on conceptual differences between C, C++ and Rust, on where Rust shines and where it could do better, on the safety guarantees Rust provides over both C and C++, and on how to bypass those guarantees."

Gerwin Dox is an embedded software engineer at Nalys. While still a novice, he has gathered some experience with embedded systems, tried a few esoteric languages and excels at solving mathematical challenges.

4. Second speaker:
   Jochen Parmentier on DevOps lessons for the Embedded developer

"The software development world has been shaken up in the last decade by great improvements in software development lifecycle execution, release automation, virtualization of runtime environments, service availability and project management strategies. The impact of each of these principles to the actual development velocity and release cycle of software has lately been categorized under the (often abused by marketing) term DevOps (or, within Google, Site Reliability Engineering or SRE). Unbelievable increases in developer productivity and shortenings of release cycles have been shouted across the software blogosphere by companies like Google, Netflix, Amazon, Etsy, Capital One, …

However, it often feels like these fancy implementations and evangelic stories about DevOps transformations that we see are always applied to web application shops and they seem to fall flat on their face when we try to apply them to embedded development and its unique set of complexities such as custom hardware targets and difficult to virtualize environments.

After successfully implementing CI/CD pipelines, test automation frameworks and DevOps transformations in the semi-conductor industry and companies operating in the embedded space, Jochen has learned and experienced how to apply these principles in our corner of the software development world. We’ll discuss what the underlying principles of DevOps are, how to apply them in the embedded space and how this translates in concrete technical implementations and good practices to live by."

Jochen Parmentier has delivered several projects in the semi-conductor, firmware and embedded application industry. He works as a consultant in different roles: from hardware-in-the-loop test automation developer, continuous integration & continuous deployment architect to DevOps transformation mentor.
Asides from this, he is a big Python enthusiast and loves to teach and coach people in developing their Python and testing skills.

Doors open at 18:30pm, and we will start the first presentation at 7pm.

Ideas? Suggestions? We are listening!

Sponsored by Nalys and Rombit.