Monthly Archives: June 2013

Allen in the real world…

Early in 2012, I began a new job with a consulting company. They were going to place me in an embedded programming position at a company about an hour away. Normally, the thought of 120+ miles of driving each day for work would never be something I would agree to, but this was a very unique opportunity for me. It was a chance to get back to my roots as an embedded programmer and work on constrained systems without hard drives or monitors. Because of this environment, the job became one of my all-time favorites rather quickly (second only to the “dream job” that got me to move to Iowa back in 1995 — hard to beat a dream job).

During my initial days being trained, I started to recognize many of the concepts of their device — discreet outputs, analog inputs, etc. They were just like the Arduino I/O I had been working on a few months earlier for some projects I was doing for a local Halloween attraction. In fact, much of what I first learned around 2005 for BASIC Stamp seemed to apply as well.

And it never dawned on me to list any of that on my resume. I mean, it’s just “toys” and a “hobby”, right? It turns out, the experience I gained building things for Arduino really helped my learning curve with this job.

So I wonder… Do any of you list your Arduino work on your resume? If so, what do you say, or how do you say it? In the early days of my career, my resume was full of accomplishments that came from a cheap computer I bought at Radio Shack, and it is kind of a full circle that I find myself wanting to do this again — though this time it’s an Arduino, rather than a TRS-80.

Thoughts?