I signed it

[cjsmith]

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 Oh wait, that's already outdated news.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.

Comments

[amaebi]

Whoa, dud! I'm so happy for you!

[jenett]

Many congrats!

[zyxwvut]

I am not sure whether to be inspired or intimidated by your lack of downtime between Retirement and Offer Signing. Jeebus.

[brooksmoses]

Hooray for happiness! That sounds like an excellent and fun next step indeed.

[billeyler]

Impressive! Cheers!

[ckd]

Hooray for you!

[noelfigart]

Congratulations!

[datagoddess]

Congrats!! That's excellent!!

[wcg]

I'm delighted for you. Go forth and do great things.

Wow!

[eichin]

I've seen some videos about zipline, it looks like they've (you've?) got some *really* clever system-usability stuff worked out. (Yes, we have an internal #robots slack channel where we gossip about all the *other* robot and autonomous systems companies out there :-)

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.)

[zahraa]

That's fantastic! I'm so glad that worked out so well, and so quickly!

[psi_star_psi]

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit ... checking DW. w00t! Congratulations!