KiCad

KiCad: Professional PCB Design, Fully Open Source

For a long time, serious PCB design meant paying for an expensive commercial license. That is no longer the case. KiCad has reached the point where professional engineers pick it on merit, not because it is free but because it is good.

The workflow is what you would hope for: a schematic editor, a clean handoff to layout, a capable interactive router, and a 3D viewer that shows you the board before anything gets fabricated. The recent releases smoothed over most of the old rough edges and added the polish that used to set the commercial tools apart.

Because the project files are plain text, your designs work properly with Git. You get real version history and diffs for hardware, instead of a folder full of board_final_v3_REALLY.zip.

Combine that with the fab houses that accept KiCad output directly, and you can get from an idea to a manufactured board for the cost of a few coffees. The gap between having an idea and holding a finished PCB has never been smaller.

Local LLMs: Owning Your AI Stack

The most interesting thing happening in AI right now is not a bigger model in some data center. It is how much you can already run on hardware you own. With tools like llama.cpp and Ollama, capable open-weight models run locally and offline, and your data never leaves the

The Birthday Paradox: Why 23 People Is All It Takes

Here is a question that trips up most people. In a room of just 23 people, what is the chance that two of them share a birthday? Most guess something tiny. The actual answer is over 50%. The trick is to turn the question around. Instead of counting matches, count

Lazarus: Native Cross-Platform Apps Without the Bloat

Plenty of modern desktop apps ship an entire browser engine just to draw a window. Lazarus goes the other way. It is a free, open-source RAD IDE built on the Free Pascal compiler, and it produces real native binaries that are small, fast, and do not drag a runtime along

Yocto: Building Your Own Linux, One Layer at a Time

Put Linux on a custom board and you hit a wall fairly quickly: no off-the-shelf distribution fits. It is too big, ships the wrong libraries, or has no support for your exact SoC. The Yocto Project takes a different route. Instead of trimming down somebody else's distro, you

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Local LLMs: Owning Your AI Stack

The Birthday Paradox: Why 23 People Is All It Takes

Lazarus: Native Cross-Platform Apps Without the Bloat

Yocto: Building Your Own Linux, One Layer at a Time