In this non-technical post we will look back at 2021 and talk about what RTL Audio Lab has planned for 2022.
2021 was a great year for RTL Audio Lab, alone for the fact that it got started and kept going for the first six months. The first post went live on July 5th, right in the middle of the year, and here we are, 26 weeks later with a backlog of articles to show for it.
Looking back at 2021
The last six months reinforced the importance of consistency and showing up to do the work that interests us. That I would be able to stick to the weekly schedule for blog posts was not at all certain when I started, so I\’m really glad I was able to pull it off.
One of the things that gave me a lot of motivation was sharing this blog and interacting with the FPGA community in places like Reddit and LinkedIn. The feedback that I received was very valuable on its own, but perhaps more importantly, it gave me the sense of belonging to a global community of people that have dedicated their professional and even private lives to the kind of work that I\’m also passionate about.
Publishing project updates in a weekly blog also showed what we all know to be true: writing up and sharing the work we do on personal projects is a demanding task in and of itself. The word length of my posts has diminished with time, not only because I made it a goal to be more concise, but because I realized that writing and editing text and images to an acceptable level of quality takes me quite a bit of time and effort, sometimes comparable to what went into the technical solution that I’m documenting. Having said that, communicating the intentions and results of my work has been an important goal for my engineering practice at RTL Audio Lab from the beginning, and though I’ll keep looking for ways to make that process as efficient as possible, it will remain at the core of what I do here.
Looking forward to 2022
There are three main ways in which I would like to expand RTL Audio Lab this year. I would like to reach a larger audience by publishing video versions of the blog posts on YouTube. I believe that leveraging video as a medium and YouTube as a discovery platform would be hugely beneficial. The downside is that producing audiovisual content in the same quality of the written blog is, at least for me, one or two orders of magnitude more laborious, specially at the beginning. I already have some ideas about how to approach it, it’s a matter of finding the time to execute on them.
I would also like to share my work in outlets dedicated to publishing projects, and which already have active FPGA communities. This doesn\’t have the highest priority, but it would be great to make progress on this front in 2022.
Finally, this year I would like to publish my first standalone products under the RTL Audio Lab brand. As of this writing I’m in the (very) early stages for this, but I am almost certain that it would fall into one of two categories: IP (design or verification) and education (eBook, course, etc.). The ideas for the products would come from the topics that I explore in the blog.
That’s about it for my review of 2021 and resolutions for 2022. I\’m looking forward to the new year where I can continue on this journey. See you then!
Cheers,
Isaac