About

They call me bomba.

I write the software that runs on hardware you didn’t know was a computer. Right now that’s at Bang & Olufsen in Copenhagen - Embedded Software Specialist in the Firmware team, pushing Yocto builds and Zephyr firmware onto speakers that cost more than a Fiat Punto.

The short stack: C, C++, Python, shell. Yocto for the distros, Zephyr for the MCUs, PREEMPT-RT Linux when the job needs it. Kernel work - drivers, device tree, BSP patches, the unglamorous layer most people don’t want to touch - plus RTSP/RTP streaming back to when that was hard. PSM I certified. I’ve run real teams through real ceremonies - the kind where the Definition of Done is a shippable binary, not a three-point story.

The long stack:

I was raised between Linux user groups and rap jams - Catania in the late ’90s and early ’00s, when both scenes were underground and overlapped more than people remember.

Started writing Visual Basic plugins for a management software in Catania at 19. Dropped out of Computer Science at UniCT. Spent a year as a tank driver in the Italian Army, 5th Regiment Infantry - not the flex you’d expect on an embedded blog, but it taught me how to execute when the brief is a four-word radio call.

Six years at Movia in Aci Sant’Antonio - law-enforcement A/V streaming devices. If you ever wondered how you record audio and video in a place where you shouldn’t, ask me over a beer. Custom RTC kernel drivers with anti-tamper keys hidden in free registers, H.264 motion detection on just the vector metadata, MP3 encoding on a VLSI1063 because the CPU couldn’t handle it. This is where I learned embedded Linux the way you learn to swim by falling off a boat.

Three years at Magneti Marelli on automotive telematics - FCA and PSA Citroën boxes, AVTP streaming into head units, GNSS firmware on STM Teseo II, SDK work on Sierra Wireless Legato modems. Three years at Zoetis on veterinary diagnostic instruments - lateral flow analyzers, molecular diagnostics, Yocto bring-ups across six product lines. Now B&O.

On the side, for the Catania scene: co-founder of FLOWJOB and WEAK, event-production crews. I book artists, run the technical side of gigs, sometimes watch the crowd bounce and remember why I started. Some of the shows got international press.

This blog is where I write up what I’m doing when it’s gnarly enough to deserve an explanation. Mostly Yocto. Occasionally music hardware. Always with my hands in the dirt and my git log tidy.

Copenhagen summers. Catania blood. Embedded forever.

Say hi: jhonata.poma@gmail.com · github · linkedin