by Jim Turley
Ever wonder what it’s like to be a journalist? No? Look away now, because here we go.
Journalism is mostly about filtering. There are a lot of things you
could write about; the trick is to pick something interesting, useful, practical, and newsworthy. Everyone weights those filters differently.
Sometimes you go in search of the news, and sometimes the news finds you. There’s a whole industry of public relations and investor relations professionals who will happily provide you with boatloads of information about their clients’ products. Your job is to filter the good information from the bad (or the merely boring), to strip away the company spin, and to find the kernel of truth that your readers care about. Is the new NXP microcontroller chip really as revolutionary as they say? Is the latest FreeRTOS update worth using? Do we need to plan ahead for TSMC’s 7nm process node? Should I be using Xilinx or Intel/Altera FPGAs?