Why Subsea Signals — and what you'll find here

Where I'm coming from

I've spent the last few years writing embedded software in automotive — the kind of work where a missed timing requirement makes a brake system feel different to a driver, and where the difference between "tested" and "shipped" is measured in months of validation. It's a culture I respect: paranoid, methodical, aware that software is just one layer in a stack of things that can kill you.

I'm leaving it. Not because I'm tired of it — because something keeps pulling me toward the parts of engineering that happen further out: under the surface of the ocean, in low Earth orbit, on benches where you can't easily replace the part you just blew up.

What this site is

Subsea Signals is the public engineering journal for that transition.

The thesis is narrow on purpose: systems built for environments that don't forgive. Marine robotics. Space hardware. Anything where the operating conditions assume a human won't be there to fix it. The shared engineering language across these — pressure, thermal, radiation, vibration, latency, autonomy under partial information — turns out to be the same language I've been speaking in automotive functional safety for years. It just gets harder, weirder, and more interesting when the test cell is the Pacific Ocean instead of a dyno.

What you'll find here

Three kinds of writing, roughly:

• Case studies — finished or in-progress projects, written up with the actual engineering decisions, not the post-hoc clean version.
• Build journals — what I'm working on this week, what's failing, what I changed. Posted while I'm still in it.
• Lab notes and deep dives — long-form on the topics I'm being forced to learn: ROS 2, pressure compensation, acoustic SLAM, ADCS, hydraulics, the parts of embedded that don't show up in tutorials.

I'm also going to publish things I'm wrong about. The point of working in public is the correction loop, not the highlight reel.

What I'd love to hear back about

If you work in marine or space robotics — or you've made the same transition I'm making — I'd genuinely like to hear from you. The contact form goes straight to my inbox. So does criticism, by the way; I'd rather find out something is wrong from a stranger on the internet than from a flooded chamber.