business issues – Observations from Uppsala

New Job, New Simulator

As already leaked by LinkedIn, I recently started a new job at ASTC, as Global Technical Marketing Manager for the VLAB virtual platform product. This is my first major change of job I since I joined Virtutech to work on the Simics simulator back in 2002. It is both a big change and a small change – staying in the world of virtual platforms, but working with a new product that is quite different from Simics. In fact, more things are different and new and fresh than the same…

The Quarterly Product and Feature Update

I think of myself to be a technical person. I like computers, simulators, code, things like that. And obviously interacting with people and helping them solve their technical problems using technology I know. However, it seems that one of the most impactful contributions made during my time at Intel was to start a meeting series. Maybe you can call it a process innovation.

Just Get the Right Tool!

We recently repaired a fence in our back yard. Not very exciting, but it provides a good case study in how to think about getting the right tools for the job. Or not getting the right tools. And the trade-offs inherent in improving the tools vs just getting a job done with what you have at hand. Which is something all software developers should have sympathy with.

Subscription Software Revisited: SnagIt

The trend to make everything into a subscription service instead of a pay-once use-forever model is well-established. I have defended it for professional software, and I am a mostly happy user of Microsoft365. Still, I must admit that I felt mildly annoyed when my favorite screen capture program, SnagIt, announced they would be switching to a subscription-only model.

Notes from our DVCon Europe 2022 Tutorial

I presented a tutorial about the “verification of virtual platforms models” at DVCon Europe last week. The tutorial was prepared by me and Ola Dahl at Ericsson, but Ola unfortunately could not attend and present his part – so I had to learn his slides and style and do my best to be an Ola stand-in (tall order, we really missed you there Ola!). The title maybe did not entirely describe the contents – it was more a discussion around how to think about correctness and in particular specifications vs implementations. The best part was the animated discussion that we got going in the room, including some new insights from the audience that really added to the presented content.

Updated: Included an important point on software correctness that I forgot in the first publication.

A Study of Cognitive Biases in Software Development

I recently read a few articles on cognitive biases, decision making, and expert intuition from the field of management research. Then an article popped up from the Communications of the ACM (CACM) dealing with cognitive bias in software development. The CACM article is a small field study that serves up some interesting and potentially quite useful conclusions about how to think about thinking in software development.

DAC 2022 – Back in Person, Chiplets, an Award, and Much More

The 59th Design Automation Conference (DAC) took place in San Francisco, July 10-14, 2022. As always, the DAC provided a great place to learn about what is going on in EDA. The DAC is really three events in one: there is an industry trade-show/exhibition, a research conference that is considered the premier in EDA, and an engineering track where practitioners present their work in a less formal setting.

I had two talks in the engineering track – one on the Intel device modeling language (which actually won the best presentation award in the embedded sub-track), and one on using simulation technology to build hardware software-first.

The DAC was almost overwhelming in the richness of people and companies, but this blog tries to summarize the most prominent observations.

Minimum Viable (Replacement) Product – The Teams Example

During 2020 and 2021, Intel switched from using Microsoft Skype for Business (also known as Lync) to Microsoft Teams as the primary internal calling, chatting, and conferencing tool. While (finally) Teams has turned into quite a decent communications tool, the transition started a bit too early from a feature completeness perspective. Microsoft in essence gave us an enterprise Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Not a proper Replacement Product (RP). Teams left out many rather important and useful features, degrading the user experience and value, and making my life harder. I don’t think that was particularly well handled. I can understand it as a product manager, but as a user, I don’t like it all.

Thank You, Sir Clive Sinclair

A few days ago, Sir Clive Sinclair died. I owe him, or rather his most successful product, my career as a computer scientist. I bought myself a ZX Spectrum in my early teens, taught myself how to program it, and never looked back. The ArsTechnica obituary calls the Spectrum a “gaming computer”, and I guess that is mostly fair. Can’t say I ever used it for more than playing games or programming games.

Jerry Fiddler on the Early Days of Wind River and Building a Product

Wind River is celebrating their 40^th anniversary as a company with a series of historical look-backs posted on the Wind River channel on YouTube. One of the videos is an interview with Jerry Fiddler who founded Wind River back in 1981, by Wind River current CEO Kevin Dallas. Jerry Fiddler talks about how he got started in computers, and especially about how Wind River got started and grew. It is both a fantastic set of historical anecdotes and some solid product management and strategy insights.

Adjusting to Work-from-Home: Remote Live Simics Training

In the current world-wide lockdown due to Covid-19, many things that were done in-person in the past have to become virtual. The Simics® New User Training that we run at Intel and with our customers and partners is no different. In normal times, we run in-person classes around the world, but that is not an option right now. Thus, we shifted to running remote live classes as a substitute for the time being. This blog shares some of my experience from running remote live classes.

We changed the cover page of the Simics training to symbolize the change.

Living with a Nokia 7.1 Phone

For the past couple of weeks, I have been using a Nokia 7.1 phone as my main phone while my main Sony phone has been off for repairs. My habit for quite a few years has been to use Sony “flagship” phones as my work phones (and way back, even Sony-Ericsson). The question this poses – how was it to use a theoretically far weaker “mid-range” phone instead of a flagship?

Undo Reverse Debugger “Pivots” to Record-Replay

I just found a story about Undo software that was rather interesting from a strategic perspective. “Patient capital from CIC gives ‘time travelling’ company Undo space to pivot“, from the BusinessWeekly in the UK. The article describes a change from selling to individual developers, towards selling to enterprises. This is an important business change, but it also marks I think a technology thinking shift: from single-session debug to record-replay.

Continue reading “Undo Reverse Debugger “Pivots” to Record-Replay”

Embedded World 2018 – Clever Giveaway from Microchip

Show like the Embedded World are full of vendors vying for attention and wanting to get their name onto your mind, desk, or appearance. This is the giveaway game: what can you hand out that will make people get a good and long-lasting impression of your company?

Continue reading “Embedded World 2018 – Clever Giveaway from Microchip”

Subscription Software = Better Programmer-User Alignment (?)(!)

IEEE Spectrum ran a short interview with Thomas Knoll, the creator of Photoshop, who made a very interesting point about the move to subscription-based software rather than one-time buys plus upgrades. His point is that if you are building software that is sold using the “upgrade model”, developers have to create features that make users upgrade. In his opinion, that means you have to focus on flashy features that demo well and catch people’s attention – but that likely do not actually help users in the end.

Continue reading “Subscription Software = Better Programmer-User Alignment (?)(!)”