I left an old job after automating it. It was insanely tedious and boring, so I built an automation platform. Went on to a job that I liked even less. About a year later I got a call asking me to come back and rebuild the automation engine into an official product for the company.

It was awesome and I got to make it a lot more robust. And since it was built directly into the platform instead of made as a hacky layer on top of it, it worked so much better. That was a lot of fun for me.

Was one of a big team of people doing a major redo of a host of legacy apps, converting to agile processes (this was like 20 yrs ago), greenfield stuff, major investment, cutting edge stuff with some great people, and imaginations allowed to roam. Had been given the role of infosec architect alongside a few other newly minted architects. Hell I even got my own office. Spent several months at it, loved every minute. IT had fairly mature processes, good reliability, and the new stuff was going to improve on that substantially.

Then we got bought out. Their CIO told us in the first meet and greet that IT processes were foolishness. It came as no surprise when we learned all of their IT staff were in constant firefighting mode. I doubt their uptime was even as good as “2 nines”.

I started job hunting that week and found a job soon after. Some say I’m still working there to this day … (mostly because I am).

Yes. And it is our companies primary product series for over a decade now.

Well, i’ve been exited with almost every new Windows release (i was born in 2000).

And i also like whenever companies improve upon their infrastructure and quality of service to better compete with their adversaries (as opposed to “haha my service is cheaper/more localized”).

Small update: I just remembered Android 14 is supposed to have H.265 hardware decoding built-in as a requirement, i’m really exited about that one. 😁

I used to work at an utility company that started to build, or rather started to plan to build a new site, for something that mostly exists in developed countries already. The normal projects thus were usually expansions, upgrades and refurbishments.

Getting to build from scratch, and especially at that size is an amazing opportunity. Unfortunately though mixing the slower processes of a utility company with political interference in an unstable political environment, company leadership where the CTO role was vacant for multiple years and the rest of management is classical business school people w.o. engineering background and insane ideas about new management practices, bogged the whole thing down pretty harshly.

With the managing practices i’m talking about things like bonus systems that most companies tried in the 90s and got rid of again. This is particularly absurd as the companies goal is to provide the utility at cost coverage, not to maximise profit. But it gets even worse, as the main issue is lacking cooperation cross departments. In an environment where people are already clingy to “this is our department standard, i will follow it precisely because i dont want to take risks”, adding on top conflicting KPIs that impact peoples salary is a recipe for desaster with a 100% guarantee.

Also they got an insane idea about “desk sharing” to cut down on office space rented, since most people are working from home. But they didnt increase the allowance of work from hom days. So you are basically forced to stay at home on specific days and go to the office on other days, so you can meet both quotas, effectively taking all the benefits for the employee away.

I left and i’m not looking back. I would have loved to continue working with the colleagues though and i am still amazed by how they try to make the project happen despite every boulder the company throws into their path.

Yes, actually. After a few months as a process consultant at separate electrical distribution manufacturing operations, I postulated that their design process could be dramatically automated. Right now we have two working custom CAD systems in separate parts of the distribution pipeline that serve as the basis for the rest of the company operations. Chuffed to say the least!

There were early leaks of the Marvel Iron Man movie costume design, and they were really good.

That turned out pretty well, over all, I would say.

But now I’m waiting for Disney’s streaming incompetence to bankrupt them and sell Marvel to DC so we can have nice things again.

I’m thinking it’ll take awhile, though. And I’ll still buy a Disney government issued ID, when the time comes, just in case. I figure I will still want to drive on my local Disney issued roads in my Disney car, while I wait.

Rewriting a researchers patchy python incremental Single Particle Analysis (and Reconstruction) in Qt/C++ was really interesting.

Crazy tech with -186°C cryo electro magnetic microscopes (the guys doing the cryopreservation makes C++ wizards look like normal people) where you scan up houndred of thousands or millions of 2D “photos” over days of some molecule and then you have to figure out the 3D structure. First run with tensorflow for me too so that was a cherry on top back in the day. Classic ‘old’ machine-learning AI was used too.

The tech in the microscopes are amazing as well, diamond knives, lasers, proton beams, quantum mechanics, electro magnetic lenses to focus at different depths and sometimes just transform matter into em radiation to “see” what it wasby some crazy energy source, the different cameras etc etc.

You also get the terminology like black ice but sometimes peta byte storage problems too.

Fun times.

Yep! As I continued with the project I realized it wasn’t going to work. Did it anyway, as I was told. Surprisingly (not), it completely flopped and the company lost a lot of money. I left and soon after it got bought out.