Casper Andersson

Some network protocols need to keep track of which physical port is which in a topology. PTP is one of those. Defined in IEEE 1588, it specifies a field called portNumber. It is an unsigned 16-bit integer. This means the limit for a single network switch is 65536 ethernet ports. Now, one could argue that 8 bits, 256 ports, is enough. But it doesn’t hurt to future proof and the next logical step is 16 bits. Surely no one will ever make a switch with that many ports! ...

What makes a developer a good developer? I regularly hang out in the Boot.dev Discord server, a community filled with aspiring developers. Many of whom strive towards being hired as developers. The question of knowledge and skills often come up. What do you need to know to get hired? What are interviewers looking for? It is always hard to give specific answers to these questions. There are many guides and guidelines out there on how to write good code. Python’s Zen (import this), Go Proverbs, The Zen of Proverbs are just some. But here I will instead try to list some behaviors I want to see in developers, regardless of experience. ...

This post guides you through setting up Buildroot together with U-boot on your Raspberry Pi and loading a kernel through U-boot (rootfs is separate and still needs to be flashed). Having a dedicated bootloader allows controlling the boot process without having to flash the SD card every time. I wrote this post because I didn’t find any guide when doing so myself, only a couple of posts that partially did it. None of which fully covered my needs. I have a Raspberry Pi 4 and that’s all this guide is tested with. ...