What I’ve learned from refining the Protoworks service offerings, simplifying the options and making room for smaller, iterative projects.

A few thoughts from Belfast Tech Week, including AI agents, AI security, CI/CD automation and the current Belfast technology scene.

Refining the UCMOD architecture by defining a clearer boundary between microcontroller modules and carrier boards.

Experimenting with an MCP service that gives AI agents a way to discover Protoworks, explore its services and communicate asynchronously with a human.

A short trip away from the development bench to see what is happening elsewhere in manufacturing and engineering.

Debugging a 921600 baud USART problem on the ATtiny1614 while porting code from Arduino and megaTinyCore to plain C.

Testing the PICkit 5 with the UCMOD-0, moving from Arduino to plain C with MPLAB, and disappearing down a couple of 8-bit microcontroller rabbit holes.

Revisiting two small Go command-line utilities I originally built for my own development workflow: db-concat for assembling parameterised SQL and text files, and repo-status for managing multiple local Git repositories.

How I’ve integrated LLMs into my software development workflow while keeping architecture, code review and engineering responsibility firmly in human hands.

Pruning the Protoworks development pipeline, introducing a clearer naming scheme for UCMOD modules, and starting work on a lightweight JWT authentication API.