241–250 of 694 posts
My startup builds (friendly) security guard robots, and now has a fleet of >100 deployed around the world.
Long ago when we were seed stage I spent Christmas morning finishing soldering in the first unit to hit our first customer delivery a few weeks later. Was a good time :)
Lots of blood sweat and tears scaling from there...
I helped build “The Cloud” without really knowing it lol.. I joined a 5 year electrical apprenticeship after highschool. I spent many days between 2006 and 2012 building out crazy electrical systems in these giant warehouse looking buildings in Northern Virginia, for DuPont Fabros and Digital Reality. I had no idea exactly what the purpose of these server farms were for, but they just told us “if we build it they wil…
Am I understanding this correctly, basically a Colo was acquired by Amazon? It’s pedantic but colo existed for decades before AWS. It’s the software layer from AWS that made it “The Cloud” (quicker access to hardware & billing by the second, not month)
That's one way of looking at it, but no one would have used that software if OP had done a sloppy job with the electrical system.
I'm sure there was plenty of boilerplate code in that software (and some very innovative code) and plenty of sophisticated work done to create the physical datacenter.
Ice cube
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory
Or maybe making a traditional bow. Identifying types of wood, reading the grain, and turning it into a bow is interesting. I think most people have this concept that wood is this rigid thing, but seeing a traditional bow on a tillering tree is something else.
I'm an EE by trade, and my work has shipped in numerous consumer products. I was lead hardware designer for Sonos Amp, Sonos Port, and a few of the IKEA/Sonos collaboration products. I've since moved on from that job, but it's a very cool resume item. It's also a pretty cool shameless self promotion thing to point out when I need to. Was asked by an executive why I should run a hardware development effort at my curre…
What do you think about the longevity of these Sonos products? I got sucked into the ecosystem via IKEA/Sonos collab and now added one to my TV setup. The ecosystem is nice _currently_ but do you think the hardware+software will be useable in 5,10,15 years from now? Do you think it could be liberated software wise. Thinking about this because I am contemplating moving my vinyl setup to Sonos as well.
Our app usability sucked then (and still does now), but plenty of our products met and exceeded ten or fifteen year lifetimes.
One of the biggest issues we faced when I was there was trying to support devices shipped in 2002 that didn't have enough RAM to run features being shipped in 2016! Newer products shouldn't have that issue. They ship with tooooons of RAM for fear of that situation popping up again.
You guessed it, boats. I have built a stitch and glue (plywood) sea kayak[0], an Aleutian-style skin-on-frame sea kayak[1], and a skin-on-frame canoe[2]. All were fairly approachable and straightforward projects (I built the first two with basically some hand tools, a drill and a jig saw, on my deck, but a table saw is highly recommended for skin on frame). Tons of fun and the feeling of being a couple miles offshore…
This may or may not fit into the OP's intention but some of my favorite physical achievements are repairs that might be impressive for a random suburban dad :) 1. Two years ago our basement flooded a week after we bought the house. I ended up tearing out the now-saturated carpet and put in vinyl plank flooring. Mainly straight forward but requires planning and at some points tricky sawing. It's cool when people come…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t this though wrongly taking credit. This is like saying “I sell cardboard boxes to Amazon, who uses my cardboard boxes to ship packages” … and then claim you built the logistics and online behemoth of Amazon.com I’m not trying to be a hater. But this story sounds more like you were a supplier to something Amazon built, not something you built.
> Isn’t this though wrongly taking credit. No, because it says "without really knowing it" right in the first sentence.
When you’re building data centers, you are fully aware you are building “The Cloud” (even before that term was coined), because that’s literally the business you’re in … regardless of who you’re customer (AWS) is or not.
I helped build “The Cloud” without really knowing it lol.. I joined a 5 year electrical apprenticeship after highschool. I spent many days between 2006 and 2012 building out crazy electrical systems in these giant warehouse looking buildings in Northern Virginia, for DuPont Fabros and Digital Reality. I had no idea exactly what the purpose of these server farms were for, but they just told us “if we build it they wil…