Bluish Smoke is the almost magical vapour that makes microchips, circuit boards and all manner of associated electronics function, as any engineer will tell you; When the bluish smoke escapes, things tend to stop working. Hence, it must therefore be the goal of electronics development to keep the smoke in.
Essentially Bluish Smoke is just one person, that's me; Josh. I gained my degree in Electronic Engineering at The University of Reading, while also being self-employed on a number of projects. These ranged widely in scale, some jobs taking only days to complete, right up to year‐long jobs integrating custom designed hardware to enterprise level software hosted in 'The Cloud'.
My background is mostly based in circuit board design and the development of embedded systems. These are typically very 'low-level' hardware designs mostly based around the PIC 16F, 18F and 24F series of microcontrollers, our preferred micro-controller platform.
We also have a wealth of experience in coding most C-type embedded languages, from MPLAB XC Compilers to ARM MCUs and the Mbed ecosystem.
That question has a strange answer; You see, for the last 10 years, I've been a bartender... Honestly, no joke. While gaining my Degree I'd become interested in the history of mixed drinks and spirits (as do many people, so I understand) and hence decided to work in bars for a while to meet people, and try some awesome booze too.
That '...a while...' took a decade, and though I would change none of what I've done (I've met my partner and been to some rather good parties), electronics development is still a major passion & these days I just also happen to mix a mean Manhattan too.