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Brilliant post. Most of these points hit home for me. One of the things I've been honing in on recently - which you do as well - is effectiveness. Brilliant developers who don't ship aren't effective. People who don't distill a product down to just what's necessary aren't effective. You hit on this concept - and many others - in a number of spots. Thanks for sharing.

That's really funny! BR is nothing like that. Definitely the best balance I've ever had. Hope you are doing well in your endeavors.

Blue River Technology - Sunnyvale, CA - Agricultural Robotics - Systems SW Engineer

http://www.bluerivert.com

Linux, C++, Python, ROS (and other tools you like to use)

Small teams, lots of autonomy, CV / ML, tractor driving, technology that impacts the real world.

Email me through here: http://about.me/willypell

I worked at 510 for 2 years. We were a little over 10 people when I started and around 60 people when we sold to Google. The whole thing was bootstrapped, no VC's. Bryon Majusiak, the guy interviewed in the article, is a great guy, a hard charger and a very practical engineer. So much so that I hired him away from Google a little less than a year ago for another robotics endeavor.

510 did many great things and got credit for nearly none of it. We barely had a website b/c big companies like Google, Microsoft and Nokia liked letting people think it was all them. Quite frankly, we were happy to take the money, but in hindsight, we should have aimed higher.

The article gives the impression that we only did hardware. That is not true. We did all the sensor integration and real-time systems software. We also sold our GPS filter to Google early on for Street View.

It was a scrappy place. We solved hard problems very quickly and big companies often resented us for it and reluctantly bought our wares. In return we were silent.

The employees were fantastic and the management was horrendous. We laughed a lot, we fought a lot and we drank a lot. The founders, like most 20 somethings who've achieved too much success too early, were amazing in many ways but deeply flawed. They did not realize that the Berkeley Robotics Lab did not prepare them to manage a real company. They could never see that they were the ones in the way of their own success. Since there were no VC's there was no board. I never again worked for a place where the CEO could not be fired. And I never worked for a founder who had too many life lessons in front of him.

Anyways, lessons learned: The value is in final products not in parts of products, people don't change on a startup's timeline and getting acquired is generally a letdown.

Onwards and upwards...

This sort of thing is great for messages in real time systems or robotic systems where firing up a JSON parser / serializer just isn't an option. We use something similar in our system but I've had my eye on Cap'n Proto for a while...

How long have you been at it? Any reasonably intelligent person can become a great developer if they work hard.

Defense contracts are not subsidies. They are won by competition with the likes of Lockheed. Most of the money won is spent providing the product or service. The profit margins on defense contracts are not nearly large enough to "subsidize" an airline business. Yes, some R&D crosses over but it's no easy trick. Lockheed does not play in the commercial space at all.

Disclosure: Former Boeing Employee.

That depends a lot on your industry. At most places I've worked, nobody knew what node.js or bootstrap was. At all those places being a journeyman kernel dev would look REALLY good.

Being a little more friendly could help their cause.

I just got back from Kenya 2 days ago. I was blown away at the M-Pesa penetration. They are skipping credit cards just as they skipped land lines.

These are the most presumptive headlines. Programmer encapsulates many disciplines just as a writer encapsulates those who write comics, novels, plays, ads, articles, law and speeches. Stop assuming everyone is a web developer. And don't deign to tell programmers what they should know.

What's mind blowing is the assumption that there should be an even distribution of race and sex in different fields. The same logic could be used to expose "awful race or gender problems" in professional basketball, ice hockey or women's clothing companies.

Blue River Technology:

http://bluerivert.com/

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/10/agricultural-...

Agricultural robotics startup. Khosla backed. Just hired our 10th person.

Buzzwords: Computer vision / machine learning / real-time systems / some embedded / lots of mechanical / ROS / distributed systems / linux / C++ / Qt / boost / python / matlab / white board drawing / some tractor driving.

We want to make something that has as big an impact on farming as the tractor.

It is a nice, clever group of people and it's been a lot of fun working here. If it piques your interest, contact me through my profile.

Cheers...

What is with these preachy headlines? "Why you should..." "Please use ..." "Please stay away from..."

It's very presumptuous to assume that you know the intricacies of thousands of developers' workflows well enough to tell them how to do thier jobs.

I tried to use Dwolla and it it was absurd. I set my account up fine. My friend sent me $1200 for a ski lease. I withdrew it and it appeared to work. Days later when the money did not appear in my bank account, I checked back and it said, "processing withdrawl" (or something like that.) It said that for many days before I contacted them. They said I needed to scan my drivers license and send it to them. The only account that has a copy of my DL is the DMV. No other company in capitalism asks for a scanned DL except for (maybe?) my employer. They had my social for crying out loud! And their UI was so broken that it wasn't clear that anything was wrong. At that point I refused to deal with them and kicked the money back to my friend and had him go through paypal. To top it off, they won't delete my personal details from their servers.

Qt Creator is a wonderful IDE. I've used many and never seen one better. And the Qt libs are underrated for non-gui systems development.

"Nothing to Envy" is a phenomenal read. Highly recommend it.

What time are the applications due? It just says Nov 2. Should I assume just after 11:59 Nov 1st?

Science can only describe the physical world, it can't tell you what to do about it. The Nazis had plenty of highly placed scientists. Woodrow Wilson did too and they were in favor of eugenics.

The deification of science is a life raft post adolescents cling to as they try to swim away from the inherent corruption of mankind. Scientists are no less afflicted with selfishness, vanity or pettiness than people in any other industry. Striving toward scientific objectivity is a wonderful pursuit. So is striving toward the ideal of many religions. But practicing a religion does not make you god and practicing science does not make you science.

This is true. They will contact you if they need "brick" sized art for the horizontal auto-scroll headline apps. They also may contact you if your app is in "hold for developer release" while they're making their decision. If you are in contact with them, I advise against releasing an update during the process. It muddies the waters with the editorial team and you really just want to make their decision simple.

Featuring changes every thursday. The week after featuring you end up in the "new and noteworthy" section which is like getting 1/2 to 2/3rds of a featuring.

So on one hand, the world is rife with thieves and scoundrels and the state is the only thing standing between what we have now and Mad Max. On the other hand you're willing to entrust people working for the state with with powers undreamed of by the thieves and scoundrels.

But what happens if thieves and scoundrels hold positions within the state? Restaurant owners pay them to make laws against Food Trucks. Cab drivers pay them to make laws against Uber. Hotel owners pay them to make laws against AirBnB. In the wrong hands, the regulatory state becomes a weapon. That is what is happening now.

Uber, AirBNB and Food Trucks are interesting for two reasons:

1) They are on a collision course with the regulatory state.

2) Their employees are, by and large, young liberals.

Cab medallions are not much different in concept than wind and solar subsidies. In both cases, the government is picking a winner.

Our types of companies have been happily immune from the meddling of the regulatory state. As we crawl out into the real world we are dog-fooding the polices we voted for. Hopefully we will realize how bad they taste.

I worked at Boeing for 4 years and they paid for pretty much any education you wanted and as much of it as you wanted. It's not that abnormal for big companies to do this.

I worked for a company that made the first two street view systems. They also contributed a lot to the robocar project and eventually got bought by google to work on Chauffeur.

The sensors and math that provide the perception component of chauffeur are, for conversational purposes, identical to those of street view. But the two teams are not working together. The demands of each project are too different.

Willy dot Pell at gmail dot com

I wrote an implementation of this for this project: http://vimeo.com/uuorld

It's MUCH harder if you want adjacent borders to line up w/o gaps. You have to find all shared verts, run the smoothing algo on them, do the same for the coastlines / islands and then put all the pieces back together. I think 10% of my code was cleaning dirty data (removing duplicate points, detecting and fixing self intersection) 80% of my code was breaking everything up and putting it back together and 10% was the Visvalingam / Whyatt algo.

The biggest time sink was dealing w/ messy data. Between countries, states, counties, zip codes, neighborhoods etc, we hit A LOT of crappy corner cases. If anyone else is endeavoring to do the same, contact me and I can probably save you a week of work.

A non-trivial percentage of "rock star" software engineers are not capable of behaving themselves. The causes are varied. Some have been so busy getting A's and working upwards that they never formed lateral bonds with their peers. Some have something clinically wrong them. Some have been told they're right so much that they don't know how to behave when they're wrong. Some tie so much of their self worth to the problem they're solving that disagreement becomes a personal insult.

Whatever the reason, the software industry repeatedly explains away debilitating personality flaws as a cute quirk or even a benefit. It reminds me of D1 football coaches defending players who behave like animals off the field.

There is almost never an acceptable reason for being an asshole. It may be worth it to hire an asshole but that does not absolve that person of being an asshole. It just makes them a smart asshole.

Yikes. We have a version awaiting review that migrates us off udids. We need the udid for one last login before they get an oauth token. Perhaps we will get lucky and apple won't test a migration bc fresh installs don't use it. This really sucks, we were following the rules and they changed the schedule.

The government octopus is on the loose. Its tentacles pluck a software company for questioning once every few months. Last time Google had to defend its search algorithms before Congress. Apple's address book is a subject of interest on the hill. And now Facebook's privacy.

The healthiest, most innovative sector on planet earth should not be summoned by a government capable of creating SOPA and incapable of paying its own bills. If our guys had any stones at all they would reply, "Sorry I can't make it, I'm busy working. Maybe you should consider doing the same thing."

Fantastic book. He also talks a lot about how being good at one thing doesn't make you good at another. Sowell's notion of effective intelligence is rooted more in experience than in aptitude. So a scientist with no political experience is less likely to be good at politics than someone of lesser intellect with that experience.