Aven Arlington

I’m Aven Arlington. My adventures with embedded development began over 15 years ago when a small medical device startup asked me to help create their first prototype. I was mainly focused on mechanical design at the time when, as luck would have it, the electrical engineers needed some help testing a custom circuit board. They helped me set up a debugger and step through the code while taking pin by pin measurements on the components under test. I was instantly fascinated with the complexity of the system and how all the pieces worked. Driven to learn more and figure out how the pieces of this magnificent puzzle fit together, I subjected my fellow coworkers to an onslaught of technical questions. Their high-level explanations of complex low-level behavior quickly grew inadequate. So, I took the leap and four years later became an honors graduate with a degree in Computer Engineering from Texas Tech!

My passion for software development can be traced back to my love of all puzzles and my strong personal convictions of truth and honesty. Source code serves as the truth. The source defines exactly what the program is going to do whether that is what we want it to do or not. Tests speak for the honesty of the source. Testing ensures that the source is held accountable for its actions, ambiguities, and omissions. Software is puzzle solving. Inserting the final piece of a puzzle would feel entirely disappointing without looking at the whole to verify its completeness. And so, the pleasure I relish when I successfully run a program for the first or thousandth time motivates me to write more software, make more tests, and solve more problems.

I have created this page to document some of my adventures with the Rust programming language and hopefully to help guide others along a similar path. As my interests include embedded, IoT, games, and game engines, those are the types of projects that I will primarily focus on.