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Hi, I'm John Gentile!

Welcome to my personal blog and technical notes! I'm passionate about solving interesting engineering problems. I like to be the "geek that can speak", so this site is mainly just for fun, but also acts as a continuous culmination of notes and thoughts that I'm learning (publicly) along the way. I love all things digital electronics, FPGAs, SDRs, DSP, embedded/low-level software, applied math and Machine Learning (ML), etc.

Currently I'm a Software Engineer at Palantir leading up secure wireless communications and EW implementations. Previous to that I was an SDE at AWS doing SIMD-accelerated dataplane software in Rust. And before that I was a hardware/electrical engineer at NGC and NI, mainly focused on FPGA hardware and Digital Signal Processing (DSP).

I graduated from Virginia Tech with a BS in Electrical Engineering, and Johns Hopkins with an MS in Electrical & Computer Engineering.


Machine Learning Blog/Website Design

Building a technical blog or website of any kind poses many unique challenges, but there’s nearly infinite ways to design a site; you can choose from many different content management frameworks and site generator tools. For me, I decided to use Jekyll static website generator because of the many FOSS extensions and development flexibility, as well as the low-cost (often free, like GitHub Pages) hosting ability of static websites. With this base framework, I found a couple great add-ons and tools that help to make a great blog for technical notes, especially when working with Machine Learning notebooks.

Posted by John Gentile on January 16, 2021



Agile for FW & FPGA Development

Agile development processes have been the popular trend in Software Development for quite awhile now. However Agile is now bleeding into other engineering areas, especially hardware, firmware and FPGA development. While there are general “best practices” in Agile methodology that can apply to virtually any development or decision process, the tooling and day-to-day project management with Agile has several caveats that need to be addressed when applied to hardware and firmware design.

Posted by John Gentile on December 05, 2020