Farewell, Udacity!

David Silver
Self-Driving Cars
Published in
4 min readDec 12, 2020

After four and a half years, today is my last day at Udacity. On Monday, I will return to my roots in core self-driving car engineering. I’m excited!

Udacity has been the most successful and fun experience of professional life. I leave with memories of amazing students, terrific colleagues, and work of which I am proud.

I am so grateful to Sebastian Thrun and the Udacity team for recruiting me here in 2016. Together we built the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program, which has trained thousands of autonomous vehicle engineers, along many other amazing programs an courses, ranging from artificial intelligence to data science to web development to cloud computing, and beyond.

This small collection of photos captures a few of my many wonderful experiences with this amazing company.

The 2016 SDC Pre-Launch Dashboard!
Launching at TechCrunch Disrupt 2016!
Finding Lane Lines — the first Self-Driving Car Project
Ryan Keenan building Self-Driving Car projects
The first Self-Driving Car Team Retreat in Pajaro Dunes
Meeting Udacity students in Detroit
We won the first Udaciward!
Meeting Udacity students in Tokyo
Udaciward Outing: NASCAR in Sonoma
Teaching with Lufthansa’s FlyingLab at 30,000 feet!
Filming the final video!
We finished the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program!
Graduation!
Brok and the team went crazy for my birthday!
Autonomous Day at the Porsche Experience Center
Interviewing Sebastian Thrun for Udacity Talks
Working with the Infosys self-driving golf cart in Mysore, India!
Filming with the Baidu Apollo team
Teaching self-driving cars at the Navimotive Conference in Ukraine!
Presenting at NIO House in Hangzhou
South by Southwest!
The last School of Autonomous Systems Team Retreat, in San Francisco!
Interviewing C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup
Live Teaching Samples!
Curriculum Team Q4 2019 Retreat in the redwoods
The Curriculum Team escaped!
Super Chris Vasquez!
We completed Los Pollos Hermanos Employee Training!
Ask Me Anything!
Farewell Karaoke!

Udacity is full of such wonderful people! My colleagues made me an amazing farewell video :-)

I’m a little self-conscious about sharing it, because it’s hardly modest. But the video is a tour in and of itself through my time at Udacity, and it makes me so happy and proud.

If you pay attention, you can even get some hints about what I’ll be up to next ;-)

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