4-bit (!) 32KHz MCU with 6,144 words of 12-bit (‼) ROM, 640 words of internal 4-bit RAM, and a 160-word 4-bit frame buffer for the integrated LCD driver (enough for double-buffering)!
The thing is a beauty! I wrote a Typescript emulator for it, a year ago or so, though for whatever reason I haven’t pushed it to GH yet (but I will if anyone’s interested! It can run unmodified Tamagotchi firmware.
The best part is the maintainer wouldn’t even approve a PR to add one sentence to the readme explaining the expectation that users need to manually add a gatekeeper exception, because helping macOS users onboard “has no value” to the project (to him).
I read that response in the inverse (that is, hiring product managers is a way to avoid building a toxic software team). Why? Because I'm on a team with no product manager, and we are expected to all service in that role, at least tangentially. Not ideal.
Thank you, this is a much more wholesome reading of it. I probably misunderstood the tone.
That said, I am actually actively trying to grow my engineers into somewhat of mini product managers themselves.
It’s going quite great so far— the more they get exposed to users and problems, the more they are taking ownership of their work.
I don’t hear things like “the user doesn’t understand” anymore, but rather “I tried to make it clear to anyone who uses it”.
They started coming up with features and changes that were way more brilliant than anything I could come up with. And also interviewing developers (who are also target users for us), performing small tests to validate hypothesis, and so on.
And they also started making little jokes in customer calls to keep users’ mood up! Some users even thanked us for letting them test our early “broken” work-in-progress :D and apologized for not testing well enough. The first time I saw this, it was crazy!
