Winterbloom is a boutique, open-source synthesizer company and it has exactly one engineer - me. I am responsible for everything - from the hardware design, to the firmware, to the documentation, and everything else! Because this is a ton of work I’ve had to be very deliberate with the tools and tech that I use.

This article is a look into our current tech stack one year in and some ideas I have for the future. I’ll go from the microcontrollers, the firmware, and all the way up to user guide. I hope this is helpful, but if you want more details about something or if something doesn’t make sense, feel free to reach out.

Stan is a state-of-the-art platform for statistical modeling and high-performance statistical computation. Thousands of users rely on Stan for statistical modeling, data analysis, and prediction in the social, biological, and physical sciences, engineering, and business.

Users specify log density functions in Stan’s probabilistic programming language and get:

• full Bayesian statistical inference with MCMC sampling (NUTS, HMC)

• approximate Bayesian inference with variational inference (ADVI)

• penalized maximum likelihood estimation with optimization (L-BFGS)

Stan’s math library provides differentiable probability functions & linear algebra (C++ autodiff). Additional R packages provide expression-based linear modeling, posterior visualization, and leave-one-out cross-validation.