Podcast

This is the home of the Foundation’s podcast — or will be. No episodes have been recorded yet, so this page describes what the podcast will be and how to follow it when it starts.

When the first episode is published, it will be listed here, alongside the archive of everything that follows.

Conversations with engineers building embedded systems and with the people who run those systems in production: firmware engineers, hardware designers, test engineers, maintainers, and the operators who keep fleets of devices alive long after the launch party.

The subject is the work itself — how decisions get made, what breaks, what lasts. Not news, not announcements, and not a marketing channel under a different name.

We are also interested in the perspectives that rarely make it into conference talks: the sustaining engineer keeping a decade-old product line on patched kernels, the factory technician who knows which board revisions fail in humidity, the open-source maintainer triaging driver bugs at midnight. Their knowledge is operational and deep, and it is exactly what gets lost when only the launch stories are recorded.

The intent is technical and long-form. Embedded systems reward patience: a bring-up story or a debugging session cannot be told in fifteen minutes, and the podcast will not try. Episodes will run as long as the conversation needs.

Releases will be irregular at first — when there is a conversation worth recording, not on a fixed schedule. Regularity will follow quality, not the other way around.

Editing will be light: ums and pauses stay where they are part of thinking, and only the genuinely unlistenable gets cut. The point is to preserve how an experienced engineer actually reasons through a problem, because that is the part a written tutorial cannot carry.

The podcast will publish to an open RSS feed, and will be listed in the usual podcast directories as well. RSS matters because it needs no account: anyone with any podcast app can subscribe, download episodes, and keep them.

That is the same stance as everything else the Foundation publishes — no paywall, no account wall, no platform lock-in. The feed is the canonical home of the podcast; the directories are conveniences on top of it.

If you know an engineer with a story worth an hour, or you are that engineer, write to contact@embeddedos.org with the name, what they built or operate, and why the conversation would be interesting. Topics can be proposed the same way.

The bar for a guest is simple: firsthand experience with embedded systems, and a willingness to talk about the parts that did not go to plan. The most useful episodes will be the ones where something broke and the guest explains exactly how.

Once live, episodes will be listed on this page with the feed address published prominently. The Foundation will also announce new episodes through the News page and the newsletter, so you can follow whichever way suits you.

The feed will carry the full archive from day one. Nothing expires, nothing rotates out, and older episodes stay downloadable — an episode about a debugging session from two years ago is still useful to the person hitting the same bug today.