[Jodavaho.io]

Half way through the year, time for a brief retrospective. Each of these could be a post on their own.

Job

It’s been a little over a year since I left JPL. After a brief hiatus at Amazon, I’m settling into my new job at Outrider.ai. Last year I was laid off from Amazon Robotics, AI, which I don’t think exists any more as an organization. They cited “Marcoeconomic factors” of course. So, the year started with me unemployed, but with some offers on the table. It came down to JPL and Outrider, and I wasn’t very pleased with how I managed that decision making process or juggled multiple interview tracks. I will have to write more about this, because I feel like I burned a few bridges along the way. However, those are two near-perfect options, and it came down to timing: Outrider could move faster with the offer, which helped shore up my dwindling cash reserves.

Outrider has been really fun, in a chaotic, semi-supervised kind of way. I feel like I have a lot of autonomy to work on what I feel is important, room to screw up and fix my own screwups, and plenty of stellar colleagues to learn from. Being a “principal” has been an exercise in restraint, mostly self-imposed, as I tend to go off on technical tangents / crusades that aren’t exactly what leadership wants. For example, screaming and crying about poor meterics. Another time for that story as well…

Hobbies

Most of my hobby time has been taken up with Hunt Showdown. I play regularly with 4 others, and the game has undergone regular content releases that I really appreciate. I’d love to play more Sea of Theives with my nephews!

On Hunt: in addition to the amazingly fun PvE action, Hunt has a match-making-ranking (MMR) system that groups into “Stars”, 1 through 6. You might imagine, there’s a pretty narrow bell curve, roughly corrsponding to mean 4 stars, and +/- 1 standard deviation per star from there. The MMR is based on KDA, or (Kills + Assists)/Deaths, it is weighted by how many stars your opponent has. It’s a fairly involved statistics / estimation problem, which I’d love to write more about, but essentially MMR is increased by kills, decreased by deaths, and not affected by assists. Whereas the KDA rank is improved linearly by kills or assists, but decreased exponentially by deaths. So, my goal of keeping 4 star rank while improving KDA means I have to spend a lot of time assisting (playing on teams and getting assists), or killing low-ranked players (playing solo and going for team wipes). I enjoy both those roles a lot, so it’s a good fit.

On the development side, I made good progress on the highfleet cogitator, thanks as always to my friend Alan Thomas. In my mind, it’s a perfect portfolio project for both of us, since it meshes nicely with my optimization and cloud integration core skills, and Alan’s deep frontend knowledge. Because I read hackernews too much, I had thought of adding a payment option and making a little side money from it, but I doubt that will happen. The Highfleet community is probably a little too niche to target for any kind of monetization, and the project is moving slowly enough that I doubt it’d attract long term payment anyway. I really owe myself a post on the internals and methods, but there’s a few items here.

I peruse hackaday.com and always get a pang of sadness that I’m not doing more with homebrew robotics. Especially since, while living in LA, I had direct access to Supply Frame Design lab. I have had in mind a long term goal of building a submarine, starting with a small pvc pontoon boat. I may have to start that this summer. I’d also love to build more potato guns. These are simple projects with lots of opportunity for nonsensical optimizations like autonomous navigation, underwater mapping, or even beer delivery for subs, and auto-loaders, software controlled firing, aiming, etc for the cannons.

Home / Personal

Life as a homeowner has been challenging. Our back yard is a wasteland of horseweed and dead soil. The hill our house is on is eroding, and needs terracing. I suspect we’ll see a $40,000 quote to get it all sorted out though. But man, do I love having a riding mower and walking out during the weekdays to look for dandelions to kill. I’m really looking forward to getting a functional garage put together, with clean storage, accessible tools, and lots of shelving. One of the most prevalent “discussions” my wife and I have is: Just what to do first.

Side note for another post: I thought marriage would be division of responsibilities, where we’re both CEOs of different parts of the household responsibilities (in a flexible way), but it’s more like a committee of two for every decision, and we both have arbitrarily different priorities. It feels like we’re both micromanagers and “micromanagees” at the same time. I’m reading the book Us, which is interesting in its social commentary, taxing in its narrative-based format, but helping me understand how to deal with this.

Related to tinkering and building, I joined twin cities maker recently. They have a stellar shop, though their electronics workshop is a bit disorganized. Their machine shop, woodshop, and laser cutter selections are very nice. They even have a forge! In addition to working on those boats / guns, I think a good woodworking project will be a playhouse for the girls, which we can keep out back.

Life as a parent to two toddlers couldn’t be more amusing. It’s like living with two goblins/hobbits. Their favorite word by number of uses is “no” by a long shot. Followed by “more”, “cheese”, “please”, not quite in a sentance, but definitely all used for the same goal. Ada has a love of solo play / deep focus, while Noa is a party animal who seems to love chattering and people.

Finally, no human-written retrospective is complete without a “lose weight” goal. In 2014, I was in the best shape of my life. In LA, everyone is looks-oriented to a fault, so when I moved there in 2015, it brought some special treatment when I went out, etc. In the 8 years since then, I’ve tapered off my boxing and working out. Now, as a middle-aged / old man, I’m trying to get back into it. I bought a 20lb weight vest with the goal of accomplishing the murph challenge in a couple years. I went boxing two weeks ago, and really enjoyed it, but have not maganged to return. A rough plan will be 18/6 eating schedules, occasional fasting, some heavy lifting once or twice a week, lighter lifting and running daily, and boxing a few times a month. I’ll see what really hooks me, and drop one or two in favor of that. Of course, I hope it’s boxing that hooks me, but we’ll see.

Conclusion

This has been a rambling, stream of thought post. There’s really no conclusion here except that time flies. If I had written this post in January, it would have been nearly identical. That stagnation is what makes life feel short. I look back and it’s hard to say what I’ve really done, only what I wish I had done. And the wish list gets longer as life goes on.

That’s the real retrospective, I think. I’ve wanted and wanted, and with few exceptions (Highfleet, Job) I’ve not really done much. That needs to change. I think there’s a mindset that if I can just find a day to work on something that I’ll be able to make substantial progress, but over and over that’s proven false - both because I can never find a whole day and because disconnected days are not nearly as productive as they could be. It’s probably much better to work every couple days for an hour or so, so that’s the goal for the rest of the year.