An opinionated anthropology of the embedded programmer, its habits and habitat

This post defines and advocates for embedded application programming at Spotify. It contrasts it with embedded system programming, highlighting the focus on resource-constrained systems with a more manageable development environment. Key technical considerations discussed include memory usage (avoiding garbage collection, custom allocators, static allocation), code size constraints, the preference for C, the beauty of simplicity and understandability in code, managing concurrency through cooperative multitasking and non-blocking I/O, fanatical devotion to portability across architectures, and the critical importance of testability and performance optimization. The post aims to set a standard for excellent embedded code within Spotify.