My Story
It took me a while to get there
As a teenager stoked on US Air Force promo vids, I wanted to become a pilot. I found out that there’s an air force high school in Poland so I took a shot — left my hometown and went after my dream. Fighter jet pilot is the coolest job ever, right? Nope. At least not in here. It took me 3 years to realize that.
Pilots will be replaced with robots soon anyway, eh? It’s better to be the one making them - with that thought, I joined the country’s best technical university to learn what technology is all about.
I majored in Mechatronics — a curriculum merging electronics, mechanics, production technologies, software, robotics, and automation. It took me two years of this mix to finally fall in love with software engineering. I was keen on its flexibility, ubiquity and theendless power of creation it gives. Then, following my coolness-driven career approach, I joined a small group hacking lab robots after hours. It was fun but I lacked a challenge. So I found one.
The Challenge
In 2013, I stumbled upon the Virtual Robotics Challenge organized by US government agency DARPA. The competition was run entirely in a simulation so there was no requirement for a big hardware budget.
It seemed like a lifetime opportunity to compete with the best. I convinced two friends to join me. The whole thing was crazy!
Three noobish students against the world’s top roboticists. Our competitors were MIT, NASA, Lockheed Martin and over 100 other teams from around the world. Some teams were even funded by DARPA directly — we had only our laptops. It looked like we had no chance at all to even score one point.
However, we were cocky enough to take it seriously and spent exhausting months planning and coding our whole robotics system. We learned how to tackle challenges we had never encountered before: inverse kinematics, robot walk mechanics, sensory data integration… I spent countless hours on it, working days and nights, sacrificing grades and social life (something for another post).
In the final, we were the top European team, ahead of 2 DARPA-funded competitors. We scored much more than anyone expected.
The Lesson
For me, DARPA VRC was a humbling and enlightening lesson. It demanded so much determination, focus, engagement, cooperation, constant learning, difficult decisions and pivoting… Comparable only to running a startup.
In six months, my team developed a prototype of Boston Dynamics Atlas robot control system. Not complete, but it allowed to control the robot in the simulation.
We used C++ (our university’s lingua franca) but we were entry-level, so if you know this language, you can imagine a what tangled mess our codebase had become. Utterly unreadable for anyone beside us. Adding new features and fixing bugs took longer and longer as the project grew. It was unsustainable.
I knew it wasn’t a way to go. If I wanted to be ready for my next challenge, I needed to learn how to develop software efficiently.
The Language
That was 2013, about when Massive Open Online Courses started showing up. I discovered “Software As A Service” made by Berkeley professors Fox and Patterson. Its content quality was so much better than anything I had experienced on my university.
The course used Ruby on Rails to explain modern programming practices, project management, web development, the importance of testing and much more. Exactly what I needed. It led me to write my Bachelor of Engineering Thesis about how modern software engineering practices could have helped me in the DARPA Challenge.
Getting to know Ruby On Rails was such a relief! Finally I could both enjoy programming and be productive. I became fascinated with web development.
The Step
As a fresh graduate, I couldn’t wait to put all my knowledge to practice. I was curious if Agile Methodology really makes the development process more effective and I was hyped on Test Driven Development (everyone has been through this, I guess).
I got hired by a small dev house but its engineering culture lacked all those things I looked for. After four months of giving this job a chance, I ultimately quit without securing another one.
During next three months, I dove into Node and Angular while searching for the right job. I didn’t even consider getting a remote gig at my level of experience but I was ready to relocate. Then one recruiter hooked me up with a London-based fully-remote startup. The company was exactly what I was looking for and their product was cool enough. For them it was the first junior dev hire, for me it was the first step into the remote world.
