Building mission-critical software in uncharted territory.
No team. No legacy code. Just the documentation and the deadline.
Most “best practices” articles assume you have a full team, QA, and time to experiment. A lot of real integration work doesn’t look like that.
This blog exists because I learned most lessons the hard way. I made the classic first-timer mistakes: wrong assumptions about byte order, type sizes, packet layouts, “clean” networks, and “safe” dev machines.
I document what actually went wrong, what I assumed, what broke, and what fixed it. The goal is simple: help engineers integrating with existing hardware or software avoid my rocky path and ship something reliable sooner.
Integrating legacy hardware with modern software.
High-performance simulation. Zero latency tolerance.
Solving technical problems we didn't know we had.
Separating latency from data age to identify the real cause of system lag. A look at how sampling delay and buffering in black-box systems impact the final result.
Performance usually comes down to predictability, not raw speed. Lessons on reducing memory movement, selective parsing, and avoiding allocations to eliminate jitter.
Why I stopped writing manual bit-shifting code. A thirty-minute audit of library headers often saves three days of debugging fragile, homemade serialization logic.
Designing for universal compatibility. Practical lessons on fixed-width integers, layout assumption traps, and handling endianness correctly in a multi-OS environment.
A personal checklist of 12 recurring oversights in integration work, covering ICDs, struct padding, network routing, and physical layer basics.