A black hole of engineering, open source, travel, and my soap box.
Ben Hilburn
Computer Engineer, GNU Radio Project Lead & Foundation President, Powerlevel9k maintainer, Director of Engineering at DeepSig, Hokie alumnus, and all-around nerd.
Like everyone else, I have a list of favorite quotes that have influenced me or that I have found especially compelling. In the technical world, these sometimes become mantras, guidance, or even best practices. Briefly, here are some of my favorites. A prototype is worth a thousand meetings. This one…
I recently decided to put some of my most critically secure data in the cloud. I spent time over several weeks researching how best to do this, and got advice from some of my colleagues with the thickest tinfoil hats. The purpose of this post is to document my approach,…
In early 2015, we decided to revamp the Ettus Research R&D hiring process. We had a lot of candidates coming through the pipeline, all the way through an on-site interview, that we would ultimately decide weren't a good fit. Additionally, it wasn't uncommon for interviewers to finish interviews…
I've recently found myself discussing what it means to be an experienced or senior engineer with a number of different groups. What's interesting about those two terms is that I don't think they connote what the speaker usually intends. Being experienced is neither necessary nor sufficient to be good, or…
When I started Powerlevel9k on the evening of December 4th in 2014, my goal wasn't to create a large project, but really just to create a highly customized ZSH prompt with some features I couldn't find elsewhere. Looking back on it, this commit message is now pretty comical: A few…
Over the last week I've received daily links from colleagues excited about the recent GPL news, so I figured I would share my thoughts here. Of course, before we continue, I'm obliged to say I am not a lawyer, and my comments on software license law are purely from my…
Last Fall, Bluffworks successfully led a Kickstarter campaign for a travel blazer that beat their fundraising goal by ~1711%. The Bluffworks Travel Pants that I reviewed a couple of years ago are still one of my favorite articles of clothing, so when they reached out and asked if I would…
I recently stumbled across a declassified field manual first published by the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) in 1944. The manual describes simple methods that everyday citizens can use to sabotage and demoralize the enemy's war effort. It's a relatively short field manual, and you can…
So you've read the loads of articles about why Open Source Software (OSS) is good for business. Perhaps you've also read Tom Preston-Werner's superb article about why your company should open source as much software as possible (but probably not everything). Maybe you've even read The Software Paradox, which has…
At GRCon16 last month, there were a number of discussions about deploying GNU Radio applications to REDHAWK networks. REDHAWK has a lot of very compelling features, especially in the management & provisioning of network-attached SDR resources, application management, and data stream control. [I actually worked on the predecessor to REDHAWK,…
It's not terribly uncommon for someone to e-mail the GNU Radio mailing list, discuss-gnuradio, asking for help getting GNU Radio running in CentOS. CentOS is known for its long maintenance periods, which makes it a favorite flavor of Linux in enterprise environments. CentOS 6, for example, was first released in…
Last month, the Chief Information Officer and Chief Acquisition Officer of the United States released Memo M-16-21, titled "Federal Source Code Policy: Achieving Efficiency, Transparency, and Innovation through Reusable and Open Source Software". This memo establishes a software policy for the Federal Government that not only encourages the use of…
As a company grows, protecting the time of its employees becomes a perplexing problem. Bizarrely, almost everyone I know that isn't at a start-up doesn't seem to have enough time at work to actually do work. Their schedules become filled with staff meetings, project update meetings, hiring meetings, planning meetings,…
Like most of the rest of the world, I was pretty sure that Microsoft's announcement that they had partnered with Canonical to get Ubuntu on Windows 10 was an April Fool's joke. Especially since it really didn't pick up news coverage until April 1st, despite being announced a couple of…
Today we announced a big change in leadership for GNU Radio. Tom Rondeau, who has led GNU Radio for the last 5+ years, is stepping down and will be taking a position at DARPA as a Program Manager. DARPA is an amazing place to be, and we are all really…
