It's nice to meet you. We are the Embedded Linux team at CloudWorks. We are a tightly knit, very open, supportive, and cooperative six-person team responsible for maintaining and developing our secure embedded access gateway and the associated build, CI, validation, monitoring, and deployment infrastructure.
Often, we will be working with a subsystem or new hardware that we do not have much experience with, so we are good at reading documentation, quickly understanding complex chunks of source code, googling for answers, prototyping, evaluating, and testing ideas. Other times, we will be working on systems that our colleagues know well, so we will rely on their documentation and mentorship.
We work on a secure resource-constrained embedded Linux system, so every one of us understands at least a bit about bare metal, boot loaders, Buildroot, Linux programming, kernel configuration and patching, kernel drivers, user space, Linux networking, as well as handling of network hardware, protocols, IPC, multithreading. On top of this, we are responsible for our access control and cloud connectivity business logic, and last but not least, CI/CD, unit and integration testing practices, and at least a bit about APIs and how to use them. We design, build, and maintain our automated physical regression rigs.
No one is required to know all of this, but everyone is expected to be driven to learn and improve.
We work primarily in C++ and Python 3, with a bit of bash for good measure. We understand crypto and security well enough not to decide to roll our own. We value TDD, clean, modular, readable code, DI, and the power and freedom that verification and monitoring give us.
When dealing with elevated support requests, we have to know our systems very well and understand the subtleties of the interactions involved, not only for the codebase and platform we develop but also with all the external components it connects to—our backend services and locks, and sometimes the Ethernet, WiFi, or cellular network we are using.
Last but not least, we understand our product and its strengths and limitations and work to improve it, help other teams and clients, and make the SALTO KS experience even better.
