If you would have asked my 24 year old self if I though I would be in the home stretch of a CS degree, quitting my job at a major US semiconductor company, joining a semiconductor startup as the 3rd employee, and cultivating citrus, I would have laughed in your face but here we are aren’t we.
About four weeks ago I quite my job at Intel after 21 years. What a run. Its hard to encapsulate everything that has happened there for me in that time. I got married while working there, had three kids, bought two houses, had some amazing vacations, worked with the best and brightest engineers in the world, and learned a lifetime of lessons.
It was all of the above that gave me the confidence to do something totally risky and different. Having gained so much experience I can say that no matter what I did, I knew I was going to be OK. So, I took a senior hardware engineer and technical sales position at a small unknown semiconductor tooling supplier. The mission is to develop and sell etch tooling to the logic market. Namely my old employer, but also others like TSMC, TI, Micron and so forth. We are small in a big pond, but I am confident we can make some waves.
Why the heck are you doing a CS degree? Why? I wake up and ask myself this question every day. My peers, colleagues, and friends have the luxury of focusing on their professional endeavors while I return home after the day at the office, cook, go to a kids basketball practice and then sit at a computer at 9pm thinking about my life choices writing a blog. Which has actually has been mostly helpful. I think about quitting all the time.
So that’s the theme of this post. Change is the one thing you can count on. Never get used to things being the same for too long, if they are, don’t be surprised when everything gets upended.
The leads me to the project out team has been working on. We have a teams chat where we all asynchronously communicate. Van and I are about the same age and have known each other, by chance though OSU and work for a few years, we are older and have much in common. The other 4 in the team are typical students. 3 guys are pretty quiet, but I can tell are smart and full of ideas. Alex the 4th, is talkative, opinionated and tends to (try) and dominate the meetings and discussion. He is a great source of disagreement and generally forces the rest of us to defend our positions and research alternatives. What a group! I hope they all stay for the year long project.
We have a good handle on how we will do the project, and what the architecture is going to look like. We have basically divided into three sub teams who will work on components. We will host the thing on Git. Areas of contention lately are whether to use sub-repos or not. Personally, I want everyone regardless of project scope to be code reviewing everything so that means reviewing all the pull requests. If we have members leave or need urgent review any two members can review and push though changes.
We have made some good progress looking at data sets and figuring out which we might want to use. Pretty much the whole project can be coded in python so there is one area of agreement. There is some contention about cross platform compatibility and development. We will probably be implementing some kind of virtual environment so that everyone is working in the same sand box.
That’s the latest. For now I just need to stay sane and keep this project on track. Oh yeah the citrus. I love growing citrus, particularly kumquat of which I have 3 trees. I also have 2 lemon trees and a navel orange and a lime. I also have several Chinese orange (Trifoliate orange), which I have been growing from seed. Its not easy in Oregon to grow citrus. I keep in them in the garage in the winter. The care and feeding of citrus would make another good blog. Maybe by blog post number three some citrus will be ripe, winter is harvest time, and I will share some pictures!
