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Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?

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Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?

#161

Post by markshiz »

It's been painfully obvious to me through various recent health scares that my (only) lasting legacy will be my children. I hope to spend enough time with them on this crazy floating rock to enable them to have the emotional security and vision to help make the world a better place after I'm gone --two things I feel like I could've benefited from much earlier in life.

Career-wise, I've stressed myself out way too much over small wins, but there are two projects that I was happy to have the fortune to be involved with.

1. I relocated my family across they country for a year to work at an Obama White House Champion of Change startup. I helped create an app that is used by thousands of students and public transit users to have a safe, cheap, eco-friendly ride home through Microtransit. The safe ride capability has been used by enough university students by now that I hope it has kept drunk drivers off the street and possibly saved someone's life.

https://transloc.com/microtransit-ondemand-software/

2. About 5 years ago, I worked on the consumer facing apps for a competitor to Nest, called Sensi. The thermostat was recently ranked to have the highest customer satisfaction in its class by J.D. Power and Associates. Last I heard it was in over 100,000 homes, and has kept a lot of coal from being burned by power plants in America.

http://sensicomfort.com

If I were to do it all over again, I would've been way less concerned about money, and probably entered a field other than software development. I'm thinking of getting LEED certified and going into green building design and/or solar installations in my second career.

Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?

#162

Post by tabtab »

calummurray wrote: post #152
nomy99 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what your functional tests are like? Do you do dry runs of the robot on mars like surface?

Yes, to test mobility (locomotion and navigation) we have a prototype model that we operate in an environment as close to the Mars surface as possible (representative sand, slopes and rocks etc.)

Try my back-yard: the sprinklers broke and we procrastinated fixing them.

Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?

#163

Post by SatvikBeri »

This is a bit trivial compared to others, but it was building a simple compiler for my friends who were working on a video game. They'd written up the scenes in great detail in a structured format, and I built the compiler to turn those scenes into code. It was super fun because I was working with people I knew, on a project with very little pressure, learning something I'd never worked with before (my background is in Data Science.)

Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?

#164

Post by rubicon33 »

calummurray wrote: post #157
nlh wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is so deeply awesome. Can you tell us a bit more detail about the systems and how they work? C? Assembly?

We have a little bit of assembly for processor-specific startup housekeeping, but that's mostly reused with small modifications for different boards. The rest of the code base is entirely C, managing functions such as ground communications, mobility (locomotion, navigation and control), thermal management, power management, fault detection and recovery, payload (e.g. science instrument) management and mission plannin…

Are there any helpful frameworks or tools for unit testing firmware projects written in C?

I'd really love to know what you guys are doing!

Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?

#165

Post by komali2 »

calummurray wrote: post #157
nlh wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is so deeply awesome. Can you tell us a bit more detail about the systems and how they work? C? Assembly?

We have a little bit of assembly for processor-specific startup housekeeping, but that's mostly reused with small modifications for different boards. The rest of the code base is entirely C, managing functions such as ground communications, mobility (locomotion, navigation and control), thermal management, power management, fault detection and recovery, payload (e.g. science instrument) management and mission plannin…

See that sounds shitty to you man but I just had an issue where I couldn't upgrade to Webpack 4 because some critical modules were out of date, but I have to upgrade to webpack 4 because other modules are claiming they'll be dependent on it soon (or I need to use deprecated modules).

When stuff like this happens I'm like... why did I choose web dev...

Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?

#166

Post by SnowingXIV »

Liquix wrote: post #2

Not quite startup or hobby project material, but some of the most gratifying work is making non-critical, easy to implement changes in your business's workflow! Sometimes users will have minor (or major) issues with the way a tool works - database takes 30 seconds to retrieve a certain type of information, there's no clear path from point A to point B in a frequently used business tool, certain jobs take 2x as long a…

Very much so this. There was a strong request for a better solution for the company's database system and I finagled some off-the-shelf solutions but I knew it wasn't great and there was a lot of clunkiness. The users figured this was as good as it gets just had to deal. I wanted to change that.

The workflow was pretty unique and there wasn't much out there that could tackle it in the right manner with price constraints in mind. I set off to rebuild something from the ground-up but tailored exactly to what the users wanted (I kept track of all the complaints of previous solutions). Because this is specific to the company, I was able to make many of the routine tasks automated and reduce time users needed to spend with the tools. Now they actually enjoy when they do! There is no gimmicky extra stuff, it's just software that solves their day-to-day problems. The application I built is super boring, nothing groundbreaking or inventive, but it works.

Seeing it run smoothly in production and having people enjoy the UI/get to spend more time on other things has been quite gratifying.

Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?

#167

Post by lifeformed »

davedx wrote: post #131
calummurray wrote: post #100

I've been working for almost 4 years on the on-board flight software for the European Space Agency's Mars Rover to look for signs of water and life on Mars: "ExoMars". It is due to be launched in 2020. Due to the embedded real-time, mission-critical aspect of the software, the strictness of the process and focus on documentation can be frustrating. The space industry typically doesn't keep pace with new technologies,…

May I ask where you are based?

Earth.

Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?

#169

Post by marsRoverDev »

davedx wrote: post #131
calummurray wrote: post #100

I've been working for almost 4 years on the on-board flight software for the European Space Agency's Mars Rover to look for signs of water and life on Mars: "ExoMars". It is due to be launched in 2020. Due to the embedded real-time, mission-critical aspect of the software, the strictness of the process and focus on documentation can be frustrating. The space industry typically doesn't keep pace with new technologies,…

May I ask where you are based?

Just outside of London.

Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?

#170

Post by mherrmann »

I'm cloning patio11's appointmentreminder.org in Austria. Doctors pay me to send SMS reminders to patients. Most rewarding was when a doctor told me that my reminders made two patients take a checkup exam in which colon cancer was found just in time for effective treatment.
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