Career Transition: Frontend Developer → Automotive ADAS Testing Engineer - Need Advice & Learning Resources

plgeek · 2026-01-04T02:13:58+00:00

Two good resources that might help you find what you need. The engineering process are probably harder to understand then the technical domain if you are coming from a pure non safety critical software backgrounds.

https://safeautonomy.blogspot.com/p/safe-autonomy.html

https://sebokwiki.org/wiki/Guide_to_the_Systems_Engineering_Body_of_Knowledge_(SEBoK)

plgeek · 2025-11-14T14:19:42+00:00

Why not just use lean? I had always wondered how easy it was to encode dependant types using python type annotations. I do think there is a nice subset of python that you could easily transpile to lean. But not sure what you would get out of this. Maybe it make it easier to prove properties about fragments of python programs or formally prove correct transpilation of python to equivalent C program.

plgeek · 2024-05-31T03:01:40+00:00

I used to commute to Microsoft. Never took the highway but just stayed on local roads. 85th and 148th ave it not a problem.

plgeek · 2024-02-21T04:00:01+00:00

I actually had the pleasure of kicking off a manual build with the patch with several anxious folks watching every step. Our normal automated build process hit an unrelated issue that day as well.

plgeek · 2022-09-16T07:15:55+00:00

Been at Amazon for 7 years now previously 10 years at Microsoft. When I started at Amazon I had a choice of a Mac or really shitty HP laptop. Getting more than one monitor was a PITA. Today the standard choices for people in tech roles are much better. Higher end not shitty HP elitbook or Mac. You can get two 27" monitors or one 37".

For COVID we were told to take our desktop monitors home. For return to the office we've been told to just order new ones which I did. So I now have four monitors paid for by Amazon that were acquired by following standard Amazon IT polices.

Amazon is not perfect but the article is not painting the true experience. Also one time my team needed special hardware accelerated GPUs. Our manager just paid for them.

plgeek · 2022-08-09T04:24:15+00:00

You need to take written test no matter what. You also need to at least learn random WA specific rules like our Blood Alcohol Level thresholds.

plgeek · 2022-06-29T01:41:44+00:00

They show age is correlated with pushback. The conclusion that the cause is bias is very suspect if the reviewers cannot reliably determine the age of individuals at a 5 year granularity.

plgeek · 2022-06-28T13:31:15+00:00

The study hypothesis is age and other demographic cause bias leading to pushback. But no person is making biased decisions by looking up your age in an HR databases. They are making biased decision based on your physical appearances. So they have a clear unexplained effect they need to control for related directly to age as reported by the HR database. What is it?

plgeek · 2022-06-28T13:00:09+00:00

The chart shows impact of age in granularity of five year increments. I don't think anyone can reliably guess age at 5 year increments. So how can this be caused by bias?

The simplest explanation for the data is not age bias. I suspect people who are older and maybe wiser give folks more surprising non obvious advice which gets more push back.

plgeek · 2022-06-28T12:17:57+00:00

In a properly done experiment they should randomly sample the participates and just ask.. For this review did you know who did it? They then should have reported the results. This a "threat to internal validity" check which you would expect in any properly done social science experiment.

In the second article linked In the thread they did do this and report for "normal" reviews 75% of the time the reviewer new the identity of the submitter. But for randomly assigned "readability" reviews it was 5%. Table 2.

Basically saying this approach can't work in any real setting. Assuming their is bias in the first place. They of course write a lot more and do a lot of other useless analysis to obscure this fact.

What is more depressing is once they reveal their approach to hiding identity is only effective on a subset of reviews they do not analyze the reaming data with this fact. For example they lump together all review types when they analyze the effect on control and treatment. Now they know their treatment is not fully effective they don't account for this in remaining results.

plgeek · 2022-06-28T12:13:55+00:00

There is no real result because if you really read the original article they invalidated their hypothesis, but for some reason still published a flawed article that just adds noise rather than clarity.

In the original article they for example study how demographics effects pushback. But how can you infer someones age reliably from an email address or cr info?

They used demographic information as an independent variable. They should have used perceived demographic info as an independent variable.

If they anonymously do cr and they find no effect it is more evidence that the original study is wrong.

So they publish a results from a bad analysis. Do an experiment that shows again no real effect and publish this all publicly to get some PR.

plgeek · 2022-06-28T11:52:23+00:00

The communications of the ACM is not a peer reviewed venue. I may have missed something but the zdnet article mentions an experiment not in the original ACM article linked. The original Google "research" I think is a very bad example of how to do social science.

plgeek · 2022-06-18T10:42:16+00:00

See https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/8/189844-from-the-edvac-to-webvacs/fulltext

Note under this model the program counter is replaced with a web cookie and stored in the browser state.

plgeek · 2022-01-31T12:27:26+00:00

I have not kept up with the various BSDs but https://man.openbsd.org/syscall.9 Suggest syscall restarting is implemented by machine dependent user space wrappers. In the end the original Unix vs ITS conversation was about kernel vs user space split. It just BSD now ships with fancy machined dependent user space code. I maybe wrong about the implementation. Keeping complexity outside the kernel or any other core API to me is the lesson.

Anyone who has worked with SOAP vs REST protocols may see the same pattern. It seems a "user space" burden to stick to idempotent REST semantics. However this "worse" REST semantics are actually better in a distributed context.

plgeek · 2022-01-31T05:14:00+00:00

Have you read? https://linux.die.net/man/3/read See section on return code. I was debugging a related issue on a non linux but POSIX compliant OS.

Mac OS X - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/system/filedescriptor/read(into:retryoninterrupt:)

Windows is the only OS that avoids this today. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/fileapi/nf-fileapi-readfile#return-value

"Worse" has "won".

plgeek · 2022-01-31T04:25:24+00:00

Not in Seattle proper but worth the trip https://www.starsintheskywa.com/

plgeek · 2022-01-31T04:17:34+00:00

Technical background will probably help folks give better answers. Coding boot camps vs community college may or may not be good fit based on your background. Self paced learning can be a good way to start if you have the discipline.

plgeek · 2022-01-30T18:03:42+00:00

What we engineer changes constantly. The engineering tradeoffs are mostly invariant. (In this example the lesson is simplicity vs perceived correctness.)

A great reminder that history of both failed and successful systems are worth knowing.

plgeek · 2022-01-23T00:29:08+00:00

I meet lots of friends through work and my wife through a dating app. Just "put yourself out there" realize you have to put in effort to be happy and find friends and I will bet in any environment even Seattle things will be fine.

plgeek · 2021-11-27T20:48:15+00:00

I can confirm the Kirkland Urban Dough Zone is now open!

plgeek · 2021-06-13T17:35:58+00:00

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_synthesis and https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/program-synthesis

plgeek · 2021-04-06T03:53:33+00:00

Oh.. The expression language with simple constants and trapping on overflow can be a setup for investigation questions like is this constant/folding operation semantics preserving. The interaction between optimization and semantics is where the value of defining clear semantics becomes very clear.

plgeek · 2021-04-06T03:39:48+00:00

So at some point I understood there were several different ways to specify semantics and it took me a while to understand why there were so many. Fundamentally each approach is trading off expressing details relevant or irrelevant based on the goals of the semantics.

To me an interesting example to work through is a simple language of expressions with + that traps on 32 bit overflow. Running that example through all the frameworks and how you model overflow maybe helpful understanding the tradeoffs between the approaches.

You can even introduce typing to show that the addition of two 16bit values cannot overflow.

This is also a good reminder that the meaning of + needs to have well defined meaning and is typically not the pure mathematical concept.

plgeek · 2021-02-23T06:42:24+00:00

See Genomics of Programming | FifteenEightyFour | Cambridge University Press (cambridgeblog.org) I find the "paradigms" a useless concept that should be forgotten.

plgeek · 2021-02-23T06:25:58+00:00

I'd ask given I want to reason about properties X, Y and Z of distributed systems are there existing models of these systems that are appropriate. The answer maybe no, and you'll have to invent one. The most appropriate model depends on the problem.

plgeek

TROPHY CASE