Nick Christensen

With us since March 2011.

I graduated from ITT Technical Institute in June 2003 with an Associate’s degree in electronics. I started working as a test lab technician at Omron Automotive Electronics. During that time, I gained a great deal of experience conducting and automating design validation tests specified by Honda and “The Big Three” American automobile makers. I learned about CAN and LIN tools and the practicalities of working with a wide range of RF test equipment. As I became increasingly involved with test automation, I noticed I really enjoy software development, so I pursued a degree in computer science from Northern Illinois University. In 2007, I was offered a position in engineering as an Embedded Software Engineer, where I progressed into a project leading role. I worked with various 16 and 8 bit embedded ISA’s during this time.

Around 2008, I began looking for a better way to automate unit tests, and in fact do real unit testing in embedded applications. I did not feel embedded applications were somehow different from desktop applications, in that they could not benefit from unit testing and “knowing it works” (quite the contrary). So, I discovered and began using Unity and Cmock mostly because they were designed for embedded, and were free! Fast forward a few years and I find myself working with some of the very same people who got Unity and Cmock off the ground. I’m really excited about my transition to making my own contributions to the team, and see only great things to come for the teams at Atomic Object and Atomic Embedded.