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I signed it
Wednesday I went home from my last work day as a full time veterinarian.
As of Thursday midnight I was unemployed. (My schedule was such that my "weekends" were Th-Fr, so Thursday is a day I wouldn't have worked.) Hi! I'm unemployed! Oh wait, that's already outdated news.
Early this afternoon I signed a job offer from Zipline. I think I was technically unemployed for about thirteen hours. For a complete change of career. Even for ME that's moving pretty darn fast.
I start in April. I have a month to remember things like how to use Emacs and how to write in C. Also to learn everything that has sprung up since I left, like git and whatever RTOS these guys use and whatever bus protocols exist nowadays and the new avionics and frankly even stackoverflow which may have been around but I've never truly met it before.
I'm going to be writing some of the on-board code that guides the aircraft in the air - are my systems healthy enough to launch, where am I, am I making progress against this headwind, am I over my delivery site, do I need to hold, do I need to head back to base, can I catch the landing wire, all of that stuff. There are super smart people working on this already and now I'm going to join them. To write code that flies an airplane without any human help. In order to deliver life saving medical supplies. NO PRESSURE.
The only real downside is a commute that's an hour each way, with no possibility of public transit - I'm driving or I don't get there. I've loaded a good audiobook app on my phone.
I am so happy I could just burst.
As of Thursday midnight I was unemployed. (My schedule was such that my "weekends" were Th-Fr, so Thursday is a day I wouldn't have worked.) Hi! I'm unemployed! Oh wait, that's already outdated news.
Early this afternoon I signed a job offer from Zipline. I think I was technically unemployed for about thirteen hours. For a complete change of career. Even for ME that's moving pretty darn fast.
I start in April. I have a month to remember things like how to use Emacs and how to write in C. Also to learn everything that has sprung up since I left, like git and whatever RTOS these guys use and whatever bus protocols exist nowadays and the new avionics and frankly even stackoverflow which may have been around but I've never truly met it before.
I'm going to be writing some of the on-board code that guides the aircraft in the air - are my systems healthy enough to launch, where am I, am I making progress against this headwind, am I over my delivery site, do I need to hold, do I need to head back to base, can I catch the landing wire, all of that stuff. There are super smart people working on this already and now I'm going to join them. To write code that flies an airplane without any human help. In order to deliver life saving medical supplies. NO PRESSURE.
The only real downside is a commute that's an hour each way, with no possibility of public transit - I'm driving or I don't get there. I've loaded a good audiobook app on my phone.
I am so happy I could just burst.
Wow!
Best of luck getting up to speed... when I started at RightHand I ended up digging back to computer graphics work I did in the 80s (because all of the raw 3d perspective transform matrix math that noone does anymore (because GPUs exist) is basically the robot arm kinematics math too)... and spending a lot of time on wikipedia after every conversation with the Math People (though that did eventually fade - and I'm senior enough and credible enough on the stuff I was expert on that posting a weekly "Things I needed WikiPedia for" report was both funny and eventually useful to the more junior people we brought onboard later.)
Re: Wow!
Their philosophy is that good enough (and working now) is far preferable to perfect (and not done yet). They went to Rwanda and began delivering life-saving supplies with a landing system that was basically a couple of fishing poles and a mattress. I can respect the reasoning behind that. If they had waited for it to look good, as a fancier company no doubt would have done, they’d probably not have got there yet even now, two years later, and over ten thousand units of blood would not have been delivered.
I shall have to look up Right Hand! They’re lucky to have someone who had been around that particular block before.
Re: Wow!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPGfFbuuGXmY1HpC7CkLZfg/videos is our youtube channel if you want to just dip in a bit - I'm not in any of the videos but I'm around the corner or behind the scenes for a bunch of them.