Programming FTW
So.
My first phone interview.
Didn’t crash and burn, didn’t do fantastically well either.
Just so-so.
One thing that got me thinking, though, is my off-the-cuff response to “tell me about an interesting project you’ve worked on recently”, to which I launched into a brief, somewhat tangled exposition on the Reprap project. Even as I was doing so, my inner critic was screaming “WHAT ARE YOU DOING, YOU’RE TALKING TO A SOFTWARE COMPANY. AN INTERNET COMPANY. HARDWARE PLAYS NO ROLE IN ANYTHING THEY DO, SO SHUT UP AND TALK ABOUT A SOFTWARE PROJECT”. But I couldn’t help myself, and later, while munching on a burrito, I think I figured out why.
Recently? I haven’t been writing much software, so there’s not a lot to choose from to get an interesting project. Even then, my projects in progress are, honestly, not very exciting. They’re infrastructural, sure, (the positive news index is meant to support a particular feature of the clock, and the CPU cost/core calculator is meant to help system builders get the most bang for their buck) but honestly, they don’t fire my imagination. Like Hacker-mapper (too big a solution for too small a problem, I realize), they don’t solve the most important problem I’m facing at the moment, and as said by Yudkowsky (or someone he quoted), the thing that made Einstein different was an important problem to solve.
That’s why I immediately started talking about the Reprap when asked about an interesting project: once it’s built, it promises to change the way I look at things. Heck, it’s already changing the way I think. Wouldn’t it be nice to a have a widget there? What about there? Once done, it poises me as a point person to start introducing printer tech to the University. It’s interesting, it’s impactful, it’s disruptive. When you compare that to my software projects, it’s no wonder why I started talking about it instead.
Figuring out what is my most important problem is not immediately apparent: even problems that are ‘good enough’ aren’t apparent. However, I think I have a problem that should keep me busy for the time being without being somewhat silly, concerning a rewrite of how textbooks work. I think it’s a good idea, but it just seems too easy to do, and hence not very enticing, which is why I haven’t started on it yet. But it seems like the idea/project that will yield the largest potential impact, so I should be working on that instead of anything else in my github repos. As Devfest quickly approaches, I won’t have tons of time to write, but I know what I’ll be working on during my spare time.
My reprap, of course. $&%*#&@ rods.