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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?

#221

Post by theyinwhy »

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,…

A colleague of mine is working on ESA mars projects as well, a mars propellant drone and a mars suite. To my surprise, they are using golang.

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

#222

Post by 8_hours_ago »

rubicon33 wrote: post #164
calummurray wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I am also interested in what ESA is using... I have used VectorCAST to generate MC/DC coverage reports for C programs. The interface is a pain to deal with and it crashed regularly, but it did the job.

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

#223

Post by jasonswett »

ad_hominem wrote: post #220
freedomben wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much agree. I ditto your sentiments. I've had a few people ask me lately why I've spent so much time long-term (an hour or two a day, for at least 2 years) studying philosophy. It's very difficult to convey the feeling you get when really approaching philiosophical thought in the way Descartes challenged via apple baskets: > “Suppose [a person] had a basket full of apples and, being worried that some of the ap…

Any suggestions for someone who has never taken/read philosophy but would like to dip their toe into it?

I'd suggest the Philosophize This podcast.

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

#225

Post by cake_42 »

neilk wrote: post #125

The formula for me seems to be: high impact combined with how ingenious I personally judge the project that be. I guess I want to be a wizard, casting benevolent spells for a grateful public. I’ve been lucky enough to have been paid to write open source code on multiple occasions. That’s a great shortcut to having a big impact on the world. The best stuff I ever did was something other engineers told me was impossibl…

Curious, can you share a link to the OS project and the algorithmic art project?

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

#226

Post by ihattendorf »

Hextinium wrote: post #197
zrobotics wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, the time saved allows them to move onto other tasks and accomplish more in a day. Saving 30 seconds on a database query can add up to years of time in a large company. It's not that uncommon for hardware engineers to be issued a company credit card, simply for the time saved vs bugging a manager for a purchase order for a $5.00 digikey order.

So much this, if an engineer is paid $50 a hour and it takes 30 seconds to load a prompt. Loading the promt just cost the company 40 cents. If they have to run that promt 3 times a day then it's $500 a year that can be saved by just optimization.

It doesn't work that way though. The company didn't spend an extra $500 that year because an engineer spent 90 seconds each day opening a few prompts. They paid that engineer the same salary as the other case. Maybe the engineer just spent 90 seconds less each day on their phone, or stayed until 5:01:30 that day instead. Or took a shorter lunch. Or only had 6-7 hours of work each day anyway so it didn't make a difference.

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

#227

Post by vbezhenar »

Our company wanted to defend their database. It was shipped as part of product (something like dictionary), so without further protection it was extremely easy to dump the database. I decided to encrypt the database. But obviously smart enough person could just disassemble the encryption and extract the key. So I implemented my own simple JavaScript-like programming language, built a compiler for that language which compiles it to some complicated bytecode, implemented a VM for this bytecode and implemented encryption routines using that language. Now to reverse-engineer encryption cracker must write his own disassembler and I tried hard to defend against hacker just calling the blob as a whole (though probably it was the best attack vector if you ask me). While this defense wasn't perfect, AFAIK it worked and this compiler and VM project was very interesting for me, especially because I used Scala for compiler and it turned out as a perfect language for this task.

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

#228

Post by thruflo22 »

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.)

The yard in the middle of the Atlas Building on the Harwell Campus?

We've been adapting some of the work that the RAL Space team did on the ExoMars Rover for use in farming. We're in London (based in Makerversity atm) if you fancy a chat :)

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

#229

Post by [deleted] »

Jemmeh wrote: post #210
yoobi55 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently a solo UX at a start up, and I have dabbled with FE dev for past few years. I am a bit frustrated with how the FE operates with this company, they don't seem to care about ensuring good UX, I'm not even involved in their sprint cycle, they just build things AND THEN ask me to fix the UX if someone points out how terrible the products are. (And obviously with TONS of restrictions saying the codebase/arch…

I do think in some ways, because UX is constantly being pushed back even though it shouldn't be...you do kinda have to learn to work with what you've got. Programming is like that too. There's weird restrictions from legal, stupid restrictions from the platform, some off the wall glitch that you have to work around, etc. Sometimes small UX changes are hard to implement in code and it ends up not being worth doing. I…

[deleted]

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

#230

Post by paulcole »

oddlyaromatic wrote: post #137
paulcole wrote: post #72

There’s a bike valet service at a hospital in Portland. About 300 people use it every day to get to work. I made the web app and a few other tools using Google Apps Scripts that make it easy for the valet attendants and customers to check their bikes in and out, send automated emails and text messages. It’s fun to have made something that so many people actually use and that I hope makes the world a little bit better…

Google Apps Script is great for tools like this: I have used some at work for a while to manage gig listings for a musician... just the tiny bit of automation happening at midnight let's them add shows via a Google form and forget all about them, knowing that geocoding, and removing of old shows, and other funny business, will all happen without them needing to maintain it. BUT if they ever do need to modify a show,…

Yep that’s pretty much exactly why they wanted it built around a spreadsheet. Before they had an app somebody built and never maintained. It was buggy and the data was more or less inaccessible.

Now with the spreadsheet they not only have access to the data when/if they want it, it’s also super easy to roll back if something goes haywire.

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