I’m a big fan of project management tools, especially bug & issue trackers. back in the day when I was leading a big development team with multiple projects and clients, we’ve implemented Jira, and with all the growing pains, in the end it was a big success.

now days, my requirements are very simple. I’ve got one project at the startup I’m working, and one pet project (actually, several pet projects, but only one at a time). and although we practice agile at work with kanban boards on jira, lately I found myself more than once jotting down my tasks on a piece of paper permanent on my desk.

As a young engineer I was writing image processing real-time embedded software for a living. we used the DSP chips for all they could offer, and used to rewrote parts of the algorithms in assembly so we can shave off a few cycles per pixel and squese out a bit more of proccessor power.

recently i’ve been writeing a piece of software for my High Altitude Balloon. the original code was written in C and bash, but was hard to manage. so for this release I used python as the programming language. for most used this is a great choise. it’s robust, easy to write and debug, and a pleassure to use it’s flexible data stractures.

while python it not concidered a “fast” language due to the use of an interpreter, it was quite all right for most of my not-so-ergent needs.

but then I got a piece of code that converts a data stream to audio file that is transmitted back to ground. when I needed to send a large image file, this modem took several minutes to do the jobs. this was not ok. so I started to dig into the code to see what’s going on.