29 Computer Vision News same direction? Yeah, I’m not familiar with that interview, but I would probably share the belief that open source is the most important thing you can do as a software engineer. The reality, just to expand on that a little bit, I’ve had these jobs where I’ve built things that aren’t open source. You go and build it, and especially with startups, the likelihood that that organization will be successful is extremely low. The effort, the love, blood, sweat, and tears that you put into the thing most likely will never see the light of day. When we all work together on this shared body of work, you can pick up from these organizations, walk away, and that beautiful thing that you wrote and contributed to gets to stay out there in the world, and you can take that bag of tricks that you just created and bring it to your next organization. When you started your career in the computer science field, what were you looking for? I wasn’t precisely clear on what I wanted, but I did know that I wanted to only do interesting things. I mostly succeeded at that. If I were in a position where I was writing accounting software or doing financial engineering for some rich person, I wouldn’t be happy. I wanted to do research, but more towards the actual - let’s get the research out in the field, do actual things, and actual interesting things. I’ve done a lot of different weird things, and that’s kind of my dream, which is interesting. If I have a microphone for a second, one thing I see that I really kind of dislike is that you get a lot of young students, and they’re like, ‘I am going to be a robotics perception engineer, and that is precisely what I am going to be, and what is the career path to get me there?’ It’s like, look, I’m a Developer Advocate right now, but I’ve worked on satellite data, I’ve worked in robotics, I’ve worked in a mapping vehicle, I’ve worked on microscopes, and, yeah, it generally is computer vision and hardware stuff, but it’s never like, ‘I am going to be precisely this, and I am only going to be doing this kind of job and I am only going to look for this kind of job.’ I don’t think I ever said that. It was always like, what’s interesting? To be honest, if I look and say, what do I want to do next? All the interesting things might be completely not robotics. [she laughs] Like some stuff I’m really interested in Kat Scott
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