One of the sessions I really want to see at the forthcoming ESC Boston (April 13-15, 2016) is Mars Ate My Spacecraft by embedded legend Jack Ganssle. (By this, I don't mean to imply that Jack has been embedded anywhere — rather that he's a legend in embedded system space, where no one can hear you scream, but it strikes me that perhaps you'd already realized this, in which case I'm waffling on here to no avail.)

(Source: pixabay.com)

Can you imagine actually walking on the Red Planet? I dream of stuff like this. I'm currently half-way through reading The Martian by Andy Weir. I've heard so many great things about this book (and now about the film), but what with “this and that” I only just now managed to get around to it. All I can say it that this is an absolutely brilliant first novel — a real “page-turner” — and I cannot wait to see how it turns out in the end. But we digress…

As Jack says in the abstract for his presentation:

Civil engineers have learned how to avoid failure from their rich history of bridge collapses, tunnel flooding, and building disintegrations. The firmware world is quite different; it seems we all make the same mistakes, repeatedly, yet most problems have similar root causes. In this session, we'll examine a number of embedded disasters, large and small, and extract lessons to improve our code.

Jack is renowned around the world as being an embedded engineer's embedded engineer and a consummate speaker, so I for one am chomping at the bit to attend this presentation. Hopefully I'll see you there.

The main thing for the moment is to be aware that the Early Bird pricing deal has been extended until Friday, February 12, 2016 (there are also group discounts and student, education, and government discounts), so it would be a good idea to register as soon as possible.