On my 10th birthday, my amazing father gave me the present that would ignite a lifelong spark - an 8-bit Nintendo Terminator! Feels like yesterday! I remember opening that box and feeling the a rush of excitement and anticipation coursing through my veins. I connect the console to the TV, power it on, and there it was… a whole world ready to be explored. I spent the rest of the day playing Super Mario, Duck Hunt, Zippy Race, and dozens of other pre-installed games. I simply could not help but be in awe of how the whole system worked; I pushed buttons on this “controller” and things happened on the TV. That day lit a fire in me and I’ve never looked back.
Later that week, I took the console apart, just to see what was inside, and oddly enough I remember feeling… I want to say disappointed, but it wasn’t quite that.. more underwhelmed I guess. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect if I’m being honest. Nevertheless, what I discovered was a printed circuit board no more than the size of my dad’s clenched fist, with some components, connectors and a slot for the game cartridge.. yeah, you read that right.. “game cartridge”. Those were the days! I’m soooo glad I grew up in that era.
That console brought me so many fond memories, playing with my dad and brothers, laughing our butts off and just being kids!
Thanks dad! You helped start that spark! 🫶
🎯 Enter the Matrix
About a year or so later, I watched the Matrix movie; and that further sparked my interest in coding. I started to read programming books and familiarize myself with the concept of programming - writing code to solve problems. I loved the idea of using logic to solve problems. At the time we didn’t have a computer at home, so I spent hours in the school computer lab, trying things out. I started my programming journey with the BASIC programming language. This was back in 2002. Using BASIC, I built simple tools; an alarm clock, calculator and task tracker!
Things got serious in 2004 when I graduated high school and got my very first computer at home; right in my room! I dived into C and C++, writing simple programs. I designed my very first website using HTML and Adobe Dreamweaver. I launched my first website - calculus4engineeringstudents.com, and published articles on Issuu. It was about this time I discovered I loved teaching as much as coding.
The next few years would be spent dabbling in various projects, learning more programming languages and really learning how computers worked; inside out.
🐦 Time To Fly The Nest
In 2009 I moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, almost 7500 km from where I grew up, leaving behind everything I ever new to start over in Europe. I was 21 years old at the time, and it was the biggest decision of my life; and one I’m extremely proud of, considering how things turned out. I took on a 4 year engineering program and graduated in January 2014 with a Bachelors Degree in Electronics and Computer Engineering from DTU (Technical University of Denmark) - the best engineering university in Europe.
In August 2014, I began my professional engineering career as an embedded software engineer at Sennheiser, and the rest, as they say, is history.
🚀 The Next Episode
Realizing I wanted more autonomy and freedom to learn and to really build things on my own terms, I decided, late in 2018 to pivot my energy towards hardware startups - another career choice that has indeed shown dividends. Since then, my learning trajectory has skyrocketed. I’ve built amazing products and worked on projects that would take me on the path I find myself today. In 2023, I decided to take things one step further and start my consulting company, Helix Embedded, to focus on two of the things I truly treasure - engineering and teaching. Over the last few years, I’ve put more energy into teaching and mentoring and I’ve do so by creating the Helix Embedded Community; by being a mentor at my engineering union, and recently, giving a talk at the Embedded Online Conference, something I hope to do on a yearly basis, if I can make the time for it.
⏩ What’s Next…
Well.. simply put, what’s next for me is to do more of what I love - building great products and teaching others to do the same.
I’m Timothy Adu, and I thank you for reading this, and getting to know me just a little better! Now..