Hi, my name is Peter Simon. I’m an Electronics Engineer at NASA Glenn Research Center for the past 6 years, and I specialize in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) development. I graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in ’19 and an M.S. from Cleveland State University in ’24. I am under-qualified to write a blog. Welcome to my blog.
Before I discuss this blog, I’ll tell you all about myself since you are all dying to know who I am. I’m pushin’ 30 years young. I drive a 2004 Toyota Prius. I love volleyball, Nintendo, regional theater, Cleveland, the pain of being a Cleveland sports fan, and any escape from my seemingly endless screen time. I am occasionally an avid listener of audiobooks, and I fancy myself a fitness fellow when convenient. I’ve got 8+ years of focused FPGA development experience with the last 6 dedicated to building an iterative decoder for a deep-space optical receive modem. More on that later; but, for now, an introduction to another tech blog.
Now you might be thinking to yourself, “oh no. Another technical blog. Probably written by ChatGPT with topics covering everything from ChatGPT to Claude 3.whatever with a sprinkling of some other generative AI and boy, I’ve had enough”. Well, yes. Sort of. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t going to cover some topics relating to our brave new world, but I’m really writing this blog (organically) as a way to improve my brand, maintain my writing comprehension, connect with like-minded engineers, and, most of all, keep my skills sharp. You see, working at a place like NASA, while the experience has been incredible and has afforded me a rich plethora of opportunities to develop myself, often boasts a portfolio of projects with particularly long lifespans. As you can imagine, working on the same extraordinary projects with extraordinary time horizons leaves some areas of technical development to be desired. And so I thought to myself, “Peter, you’re pushing mid-career soon. If you don’t start finding ways to branch out and make something new you’re burnt and buttered toast. Also, you’re starting to write like a square”.
So here we are. A place I’d never thought I’d be: a blog. I don’t even read blogs that much to be honest, which might be where this starts. As I write this, I’m furloughed so it’s easy to sit down and dedicate a few hours to writing what’s on my mind. However; I worry, as I’m sure everyone who writes blogs does, that once I’m fully (re)immersed in the throes of technical excellence and locked in on some extreme VHDL programming back at work I’ll struggle to find time to just sit and write. Not to mention my plan for this blog is to write about things I do, and so I have to do those things to write about them. I’m laying it all out here in the introduction for my own accountability and to forewarn that, while I will give technical advice for topics I find interesting, I’ll also probably brain dump a bit. With that, here’s my plan for this blog.
First, I want to talk about Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) as it relates to FPGA development since this is my current project. My expertise lies with the AMD suite of FPGAs, so I intend to present some thoughts and experiments using Vivado as my platform. That blog post is live now, please go check it out!
Next, I may talk about generative AI. Yikes. It’ll be cool though, I promise. We’ve been doing a lot of exploratory work at NASA using some internal generative AI tools, and, although we are still actively discovering how AI can assist digital design and development, I’ll share some neat stuff I’ve cooked up along with cautionary advice. I’m also looking for some engagement to help me better utilize our new expensive artificial friends. I also may save this topic for a later date as well as I continue to experiment.
Then it’s really whatever I feel like writing. I’ll assuredly write a post on my experience working on deep space optical communications and the Artemis-II program as well as my general experience at NASA, but I want to see how the next few months shake out first. Then I’ll write on whatever stuff I’m doing. Currently working on a little audio project with a Basys-3 board, so that might be interesting. Or not. I’ll try to make these somewhat easy to read and funny, but I will also use big words to keep my brain crinkly and prove to myself that my fire ACT score in high school wasn’t just a phase. My plan is to post 1-2 times a month.
I’m excited to meet some new folks in this field and try to expand my network a bit. Also excited to build a place for me to inspire personal development and put my own thoughts down on paper with a little accountability so I don’t disintegrate into irrelevance.
Thanks for reading,
Peter
W. Peter Simon 
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