wicker

Any chance we could add a single character flag/prefix to titles on the front and search pages to indicate post titles which have been changed?

Location: Portland, Oregon

Remote: OK

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Embedded systems from circuit schematics, component selection, board layout, assembly, soldering, testing to writing code for microcontrollers (embedded OS or bare metal), and FPGAs. C/C++, Assembly, MATLAB/Simulink, Python. Also VHDL and Verilog for FPGAs.

Resume: upon request

Email: jeh.wicker@gmail.com

Website: http://jennerhanni.net

Github: http://github.com/wicker

I have a Master's in Electrical and Computer Engineering. I much prefer systems integration or full-stack stuff where there are lots of pieces to go together. My recent work has been putting IR and visible camera cores together in an aircraft camera housing with custom microcontroller and FPGA-carrying boards; the code is writing C and VHDL to output blended video so the pilot can see at night and through light fog.

All my work experience has been in aviation: avionics technician, aircraft homebuilding, writing quadcopter stability code, modeling UAV payload systems at a drone manufacturer, and building hardware for 12-foot rockets that stream video and data to the ground during flight over wifi. http://psas.pdx.edu/

I would prefer work in aviation or on mobile robot platforms. I've messed around with building and control of an underwater robot.

I'm looking for either contract work that's remote and part-time or for a full-time on-site position. I just want a job where I can geek out while making a tangible product.

Not to feed the trolls, but I've been thinking a lot about my relationship with my smartphone and the societal expectations of availability lately. Phones are effectively tracking devices.

Are you saying you don't carry a cellphone? How has that decision impacted your daily life?

I was having trouble with the headphones not being a clear enough signal so I took a 3'x4' black foam posterboard and made a cubicle door. It caused a stir but mostly just in the people who liked to come by and ask me if I'd opened the cat gif they'd just emailed. Having the door closed is a nice clear signal and so far it's worked fine, for exactly your reasons. I can now trust that I won't be interrupted and I can relax to focus.

What language?

"When some young idiot fucks up, check to make sure that they are sufficiently freaked out. If they are, no need to yell at them. Instead support them in solving the problem."

My first job was as a Marine avionics technician and I had the misfortune to work for bosses who reassured themselves by blaming you at full volume and making you feel like shit. Usually with the 'you could have killed somebody you useless idiot' which is actually not that often true. Not a great environment.

Last week I'm just starting my second year at this company as a real proper electrical engineer and I neglected to run all the steps of the pre-tests I said I ran and I therefore missed a (in retrospect, really cool) bug that showed up in front of the certifying examiner on a Friday afternoon. Said examiner costs a lot of money per hour, it's a government agency, etc. etc. I spent a weekend and Monday finding the bug and squashing it. It took til Friday before the new code was released and all the paperwork up to the certifying agency was fixed.

The whole time my boss was there and clearly frustrated but also very clearly keeping quiet. I definitely went and thanked him on Friday afternoon when it was all over for being so chill about it. He said it was no problem as he could see I had sufficiently embarrassed myself and was working hard to fix it. It's so true. I was keeping my head down, being calm but intent on the problem, and I don't know how I could've solved anything if he'd lost his shit.

Fear and care are definitely with me now. As is proper testing and better logging of my own day-to-day dev process. (Note to self: power cycle in the test when it tells you to power cycle. You're also testing the non-obvious functionality.)

Is it common to build a project without using any third party tools or libraries?

You can also pick up a domain name and point it at your github repo. I've got wickerbox.net for $10 a year from Namecheap being served out of wicker/wicker.github.com. One of the neat features is that any time you do put in a gh-pages branch in one of your other repositories, it's accessible by wickerbox.net/name-of-repo.

Thanks for writing this, swanson. I've written on and off over the last few years but lately I've wanted to write, started to write, and then lost the nerve and never posted. Hearing "you don't have to be the next Joel On Software" helps.

Github and source control are the very first things out of my mouth when someone expresses interest in programming. They were the first things that were recommended to me. I basically say to go get set up on github and walk through the tutorials, and 'follow' me while you're at it. Instant community feeling and the new programmer can always Stack Overflow 'how to revert my last commit'. It's low-hanging fruit to get set up.

Next, I usually suggest grabbing an introductory reference and a bunch of small projects (usually my go-to is Project Euler) in the language of their choice. What she's doing is exactly what I'd recommend if you were brand new and wanted to get a feel for the landscape.

All of those appear to be in Icelandic. Is there any significance of the Snowden bill in particular being in English?

EDIT: Oh right, just saw that the link's through Google Translate. My bad.

The joke's on them. The ticket will go to the R&D department of the driverless cab company.

Any chance you know where I could find that list or something like it?

Are your downvotes coming because of you specifically suggesting github or are they because of the underlying idea? I think the idea's good. I had a group projects in a coding-intensive course (not distance) this summer and one of our members procrastinated endlessly. He kept insisting he'd done work and we hadn't but he was new to version control and didn't realize that you can pull up commit logs. He quit the team when he saw them.

At the least, if someone contributes a ton of code for an assignment in one shot that's identical to somebody else, the professor could compare commit logs there too. Tons of code is out there on the internet and plagiarism is something that'll be tempting on the job under a deadline, too, with potentially more serious legal consequences.

I keep my code private until the class is over, then open-source it. I consider this stuff to be my resume.

Was it this one by Raganwald?

http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-dont-hire-unlucky-people

Do you have a source for this number that accounts for women who have labelled themselves 'M' in order to avoid harassment? It's common among my friends to do so, which goes back to Anita's original point on misogyny having effects in games.

I haven't seen a study which addresses how many women do this, nor a clear breakdown on how many of them do it because they've experienced harassment or are just worried about it because of second-hand stories.

Those sponsorships exist already -- they're called internships.

What would be great would be a FOSS-only list of internships and push for a change where a remote internship was more common, which I think is more what you're getting at with how GSOC differs from existing options.

I completely agree with you on the merits of the program. Why don't more companies do it on the scale of GSOC? Organizing it must take multiple full-time people. It'd be great to see more programs where students get paid for their work but I want to point out that it's not the only way companies and students are both benefiting from collaboration.

I'm at Portland State and we've got a solid six-month capstone program in computer science where local companies, including several in open source, are working with student teams. I know electrical/computer has a similar program with a more hardware focus. It's not that GSOC is the only program where companies work with students, only the most visible.