“Dojo” translates to “place of the way” and represents an environment for immersive learning. Here at Dojo 5, we prioritize that learning by encouraging our engineers to always be on the look out for the latest news, new technologies, and new tools that help us modernize the firmware product development and deployment experience for our clients.
To help other engineers expand their knowledge as well, here’s a collection of interesting blogs, news, and tools that our engineers have been reading this month.
Blogs
As normal, Julia Evans puts out straightforward and interesting posts, this one about ANSI escape codes and their interlacing standards: https://jvns.ca/blog/2025/03/07/escape-code-standards/
C++ can be complicated, and this blog talks about one of the reasons in a very enjoyable way: https://blog.tartanllama.xyz/initialization-is-bonkers
Opinionated blog post on how to learn Rust: https://corrode.dev/blog/flattening-rusts-learning-curve/
News
Crowd Supply’s Teardown conference has announced their schedule. A few D5 embedded engineers are going and looking forward to quite a few of the talks! https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025/updates/get-ready
GNU screen security issue announced, mostly affecting the 5.0.0 release: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2025/05/12/1
ESP32-C5, Espressif’s first RISC-V SoC that supports 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz dual-band Wi-Fi 6, BLE, and IEEE 802.15.4 connectivity, is now in mass production! https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-C5_Mass_Production
Technical Learning & Books
OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini System Card provides a look into the new models in comparison to the 01 version in terms of various safety levels and how bad of hallucinations that they may generate. https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/2221c875-02dc-4789-800b-e7758f3722c1/o3-and-o4-mini-system-card.pdf
An interesting paper examining LLMs (mainly chatbots) and their impact on earnings or recorded hours for different occupations during 2023 and 2024: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933
Dojo Five Book Club
We just finished Looks Good To Me, a book that aims to provide comprehensive coverage of every part of the code review process, from choosing a system to keeping reviews manageable for everyone involved.
Overall Opinion: This is a book with significant value for Junior Engineers and folks who have never worked with a PR / Git forge workflow before. It has a lot of good advice, especially around formalizing the agreement on processes that a team has to make, and there are a lot of good tips and references. But for senior engineers who have worked with these sorts of tools and practices already, it wasn’t particularly novel.
D5 Recommended? We would recommend handing this book to an intern or fresh-out-of-college hire, as it was well written and approachable.
Videos
A recent talk from Qcon San Francisco, “Exploring the Unintended Consequences of Automation in Software”, is an enjoyable watch. The presenter Courtney Nash shares insights from thematic analysis of software incident reports, highlighting the multiple roles automation plays in failures. https://www.infoq.com/presentations/consequences-automation-software/
Kicon North America happened right at the end of this month! If you missed out, their youtube page should put out the talks in a couple months: https://www.youtube.com/@kicadeda
Tools
List of git tricks you may not have run into before! https://blog.rahix.de/git-tricks/
Like to do remote mob programming? Checkout a neat utility for handling git commits during it: https://mob.sh/
And another remote collaborating tool, we wanted to give a shout-out to the LiveShare plugin for VSCode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliveshare.vsliveshare
Does your company not have a bug tracker? Or maybe you’d like to track bugs even if you’re not connected online? Check out this cool bug tracker that uses objects in the git repo itself to track your bugs : https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug
Adaptive Cards are useful for piping test results for robustness testing over into a MS Teams channel. This tool makes it a lot easier to design visually https://adaptivecards.io/designer/
Record your terminal and create a video playback that lets people copy+paste from the video terminal to their own! https://asciinema.org/
Wrap-up
At Dojo five we pride ourselves on staying informed and up-to-date with the latest in all things tech. Could your team benefit from some super talented engineers who are in the know for modern tips, tricks, and best practices? If so, book a call with us to get the conversation started! We look forward to hearing from you!
