Category Archives: Work
Big Things
As a rule, I stay away from self improvement books. I often find them not that helpful and the lessons are useless if you don’t have a plan to implement them anyway. I made an exception for “How Big Things Get Done” by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, though, since it came recommended by a…
Good enough
The James Webb Space Telescope was in the news a couple of months ago after the primary mirror sustained a bit of damage from a micro meteoroid hit. Not a big deal. The damage is small compared to the size of the mirror and the frequency of these hits can be probabilistically forecasted to ensure…
Out for a walk
I’m a very geographically inclined individual. I appreciate maps, particularly a good topographic one. Navigation is something of a hobby of mine and recognizing where I am relative to the local terrain is one of my favorite parts about hiking. As such, I tend to have good geospatial memory and often relate my memories to…
Failure Mode
A few things to keep in mind if you have a major test failure: Take a big deep breath and don’t touch anything. Our inclination as engineers is always to poke things and try to fix it right away. That is a bad idea. Leave the room. Go home if its the end of the…
To be taught, if fortunate
Science fiction and fantasy author Becky Chambers gave a short talk at JPL last week. We were all expecting a fun conversation, probably accompanied by a powerpoint presentation, about what it’s like to be a science fiction writer. Instead she gave us so much more. Chambers’s talk was essentially a love letter letter to space…
Preparation
I’ve accepted that I can’t control much about Mars. When you start a new day as a rover driver the terrain is what it is, sometimes rocky, sometimes sandy, rarely amenable to remote robotic activities. Science describes what they want and sometimes we can do it, sometimes we can’t. There are power constraints, data constraints,…
Tactical Plans
Deciding where to drive a rover on Mars is a complicated process. We break it down into three levels of fidelity at JPL: strategic, tactical, and supratactical. Strategic planning is long-term thinking on the scale of months to years and addresses questions like roughly where do we want to go, what are the high level…
Project Lifecycles
When I started my career, I generally thought that projects proceeded like the first chart below, which plots entropy as a function of time. You start with a high number of unknowns at the proposal phase. There’s a lot of work in the PDR (Preliminary Design Review) phase to understand the problems and put together…
Robots and Interviews
As far as I could tell at the time, my very first interview at JPL did not go well. This was at the end of an internship when I was poking around about full time jobs and my mentor helped me set up a meeting with a couple of supervisors. I was expecting a friendly…
Play your position
I played youth baseball back in middle school. Once during practice the shortstop ran what seemed like halfway across the outfield to catch a fly ball. Afterwards, our coach commented that it was a good catch, but the center fielder was in position to make the catch and the shortstop should have been elsewhere on…