There’s no denying that the whole world is moving towards instant gratification, solving hard problems quickly, and optimizing for efficiency.
Sure - that’s great and all, but that mindset won’t get you far if you want to become a strong and competent engineer.
# Meet Nick.
He’s an electrical engineer at YosysHQ.
When he’s not busy doing his 9-5, you’ll find him bouldering or listening to audiobooks on his couch.
Nick started coding in high-school, teaching himself to program TI-BASIC on his calculator.
When he reached uni, he started making personal projects based on ideas he saw online. He even made a program to solve Wordle! Cheeky.
From there, his interest shifted towards more of what he does today, projects focused on Verilog and code analysis.
Like many other engineers, Nick found his way to YosysHQ after his internship. In his final years of school, he completed his capstone project where he created a set of hardware designs built using only open-source tooling, which included Yosys. He then completed his honors thesis by creating a static analysis tool for Verilog.
Undoubtedly, he’s in the right field!
The industry is more active than ever. There are many changes happening both in the hardware space as well as the tooling used for hardware design.
In our interview with Nick, he mentioned the potential of Tenstorrent. Its focus on scalable distributed systems for deep learning networks and their application to a much wider range of problems is very impressive.
The exciting chip startup Taalas was also brought up. Its idea of hardcoding a machine learning network into silicon to enable more efficient inference, is worth keeping an eye on!
On the tooling side, languages like Chisel are always improving the development of high-level synthesis tools. There is now a lot of potential for greater abstraction in hardware design with relatively low overhead cost.
What’s even more interesting is the current research into fuzzers and formal verification, especially the idea of bringing software fuzzing techniques into the hardware ecosystem.
Nick’s interests in the industry go beyond the tech, though!
When asked why he enjoys working at YosysHQ, he described the company as full of smart, patient people who are genuinely happy to help you understand anything 😊
Everyone is very humble and willing to listen to anyone’s suggestions for improvement.
(And that’s exactly the kind of culture we are proud of!)
His advice for young aspiring devs is simple. First, you need to build a strong foundation! Not just through university lectures, but also through watching or listening to other content online: be it lectures, conference talks, or podcasts by people who have done interesting and technical work.
This will give you a wider breadth of knowledge of different fields and how they fit together. But the most important step to becoming a strong engineer is working on hard problems, getting stuck, and actually spending time thinking about how to resolve that issue.
According to Nick, that discomfort of being stuck and the process of thinking your way out is the most important part of becoming a more capable engineer and problem solver.