One owner, from firmware to cloud

I'm Ethan Tyink. Thirteen years of building software, nearly all of it on products where an app, a physical device and a backend have to agree with each other — and where being wrong has consequences past a bad review.

VectorForge, LLC is how I take that on directly. No account manager in front of the work, and no handoff between whoever scoped it and whoever writes it — you deal with the engineer, which is the point.

I started in defence, reverse-engineering software across MIPS, PowerPC and x86 at Northrop Grumman's Xetron division, building embedded solutions on Freescale Linux and secure network applications. That is where I learned to treat a system as something an adversary will study rather than something a user will politely operate.

Then six years at LISNR, transmitting data as inaudible high-frequency audio. I built the portable C++ SDK that put it on payment terminals and conference hardware, wrote the low-latency audio stacks for iOS and Android, and led the WebAssembly work that got the whole thing running in a browser tab. I moved from embedded engineer to leading the team, and stayed on afterwards as a technical advisor.

Since 2022, Response Technologies, where I own a BLE personal-safety product end to end — Zephyr RTOS firmware on a Nordic SoC, native apps on both platforms, and the Terraform-defined serverless infrastructure between them.

Why one owner beats three vendors

Connected products fail at the seams. Firmware assumes one thing, the app assumes another, and the backend was written to a spec that was accurate six months ago. When three vendors own three layers, that disagreement is nobody's contractual problem until it is everybody's production problem.

Owning all three means the wire protocol has one author. It is not the right shape for every project, but for a connected product with a small team it is usually the difference between shipping and integrating forever.

Outside client work

I rebuilt the website for the Indiana Field Archery Association, a volunteer-run state sports body running unpatched WordPress. Not the usual entry in an embedded engineer's portfolio, but a fair demonstration of the approach: audit honestly, keep every old link alive, cut the running cost to almost nothing, and hand over something the volunteers can maintain without me.