I'm in a few women in tech groups. A woman, who is a highly experienced developer, shared that she had a conversation with her male friend, who is a startup founder. He said that his criteria for recruitment are high levels of math and physics since high school and early interest in programming (e.g. age of 10). She said his criteria made her sad and excluded.

A fellow woman developer commented that it's reasonable to feel sad when you learn your good friend is an idiot. I snorted some Monster out of my nose reading this and I'm still coughing and chuckling.

To be honest, the founder's requirements do sound super ridiculous, and I imagine his startup is made up of clones of the same guy type, wearing different shades of gray t shirts and sandals with socks.

The newest addition to our lab - Pikachu!
We managed to overcome the weirdest pinout configuration ever on the MCU and power up the Nvidia Jetson.
Next week I'm going to make a clean install of the Jetson because there is some funky garbage there, and then I'll try to drive the little beast :)

So the new robot (Dingo) arrived yesterday. Today I did the unboxing, and damn was it disappointing. I realized the university purchased it not from the company I recommended, and they messed up the delivery.
The robot controller was missing, and the charging cable did not match the charging station input. Like dude, you had one job!
Since the lady in administration decided to disregard my recommendation and order from a random shop, she might as well assemble the robot herself....

I interviewed for a YouTube channel that hosts young researchers from different fields, to discuss robotics (in very simplified and people-friendly terms).
I also to managed to assemble my TD-7 drum kit remarkably fast, considering I don't have previous IKEA experience. This is why you should give opportunities to enthusiastic juniors, they might surpass your expectations :)

My advisor thought that my MCL algorithm behaves a bit strange, so he wanted me to investigate it. I said I'd be happy to review the code because I anyway considered refactoring, and asked if I can have another pair of eyes to help me.
A more senior PhD student was assigned to help me, and by the suggestion of my advisor we tested my code against a very well-written and well-performing implementation of MCL. This implementation was written by another professor, who is a close friend of my advisor and the actual supervisor of the student assigned to help.
But this implementation was optimized for a very specific type of maps, and on the maps I worked on it just failed consistently. The student, in a misguided attempt to protect the pride of his advisor and subsequently his, wasted days adding code and fine-tuning the implementation.
In the meantime, my MCL has a stable configuration that converges on both types of maps. It behaves differently, but the outcome is about the same as the other implementation.
I am a little sick of wasting my time (week+) on someone else's attempt to reassure their ego, so I'm doing my planned research work on the weekend...

JSON de/serializer for C++, recommendations?

I used boost serialization until now, and it's fine.
But I will need to send some stuff over REST protocol to my future-web-GUI.
I would like something that is easy to build, not bloated, and could handle class serialization.
Shoot!

Training the beast!
Hopefully I will submit my paper soon, and then I can share a video of the beast in action :)

So my localization algorithm actually runs onboard my YouBot :)
My paper was basically torn apart by my professor, so I had to write some new classes and redo the whole experimental section. And all the other sections too. I resubmitted it to him after revisions, and the second iteration was way better - I'm really close to final paper level :)
I told my professor and postdoc that I will appreciate more support and positive feedback, because so far our communication was only very dry criticism. For me it's really devastating, because feeling like I constantly disappoint people just kills me on the inside.
It seems like they took it to heart, they have been nicer to me in the last few days :)

Do you think being a great software engineer is simply hard work and passion?
Or there is also a component of natural affinity, certain personality traits, etc.

People of devRant, how did you meet your spouse/partner, and what is their occupation?

I am just wondering how you get to actually meet people and create relationships while having an insanely intense tech career.

Sometimes I wish I was driven by positive reasons, and not by self-loathing and sense of worthlessness. I didn't have an actual vacation for over 3 years.
I am now in Thailand with my parents, and I am working my ass off to meet IROS/RAL deadline instead of chilling. The urge to continue working is really compulsive. I am very tired.
On a brighter note, the early experiments I ran look promising

The reason I don't have friends is because I embed Python code in C++, instead of using pybind like the Linux gods intended us to 😅
If you want to load data from Pandas DataFrame in a C++, I can put some examples on my Github.

I was watching "hacker reviews hacking scenes from movies", and god forbid they brought a woman to do the analysis. A lot of butt hurt boys in the comments, that women left the kitchen and got into programming.
This aside, the combination of ignorance and arrogance was just wow. I mean, if you want to be a dick, at least back it up with skills.
Don't make claims about how "GUI is the single most important piece of any software". *laughing in embedded programming*

I got the booster shot yesterday but I'm pretty sure they injected me some psychoactive drug. I had the weirdest dreams - I was have in-depth arguments with my post-doc about complexity and deep learning, and I came up with 3 different directions for my research. Also my mom was singing Despacito in the background.
My arm is dead and I can't even connect cables on my beloved robot :(

My professor asked for some images of cool stuff I worked on for a presentation he is giving. So here is me moving fast enough to cause motion blur :) The code is using the camera to detect people, and then project the bounding box down in the lidar frame, and mask all the lidar points within that cone.
Anyway, if someone is familiar with super fast agglomerative clustering code in C++ (or even python, if it's efficient), please share it with me!

If you have a new Alienware, I highly recommend not to try installing Ubuntu on it. I can't even describe how many levels of hell I went through to get stuff working, and how every Ubuntu base update gives me a panic attack.
From Ubuntu not installing with RAID settings, then not being able to boot in GUI mode because Nvidia drivers, to built-in keyboard, speaker and mic not working.
Praise the Ubuntu lord, now everything is working, but I still can't adjust the rgb keyboard colors :(

I hate academia. It feels like a rigged game, where some people don't have to do even the bare minimum to have their paper accepted, thanks to their associations/connections. I just read a paper who got accepted to a top robotics conference, with no published code, no bench-marking against other methods and obviously no looking for related and previous work on that topic. I am furious!

Pretty much everything on shadertoy <3

10/10 best out of stock message I've ever seen. "Victim of its own success" 😂
If all goes according to my devilish plan, I will get a new robot!

A shout out to Dear ImGui developers - super amazing job! Took me 1-2 hours to figure how things work from the examples.
A few C++ files is all I needed to integrate the GUI into my project, and it was rather painless.
My UI/UX skills are poor, so the awful interface is on me :)

TorchScript is pure pain, and Torch c++ is so poorly documented you might as well just call random functions and objdump to figure what the hell is going on there.

I opened an Instagram account to document my work with the robot, because there is so much mechanics and dirty work and painful engineering done, which will never be acknowledged in any future paper I might publish.
For now it looks like I am doing well, since instead of dick pics from followers, I get LinkedIn requests :)

On days like this I am very happy I chose to be an engineer and not tried my luck at being an Instagram influencer. I'm also quite relieved I don't work at Facebook or any of its metastases.

I nearly beheaded my colleague because he left dirty coffee cups and an open biscuit package in our robotics lab, where we shouldn't even bring food to begin with, let alone leave it to rot.
To make things worst, we had a surprise visit of people from another department, who spent 1 hour looking for the Allen wrench that was hiding under the biscuit package....

Sometimes I see rants about issues that are somewhat in my domain, and I think about replying something that might be useful. But then I check other rants by those users, and there is a bunch of weird slang that requires me to turn to Urban Dictionary, mixed with overwhelming amount of edginess and paranoia, and I'm like - no, I'll pass on that one.

I want to thank the Dell support guy who explained to me that I purchased an Alienware (no shit, I guess this explains how 3000$ disappeared from my bank account!).
Then he proceeded to explain to me that 1.5 hours battery life, for a 86Wh battery, when the only usage is browsing, is completely normal!
My dude, this bullshit ain't gonna fly with me.

My code review nightmare is reviewing C++ code that was written by Matlab people. Letting them commit code without reviewing it will surely bring Armageddon, but having to watch these horrors...
Functions signature like 'void func(int arr[3])'. Nononononono.

My banker is from Kenya and every time I see him we completely drift off finance and talk at length on education, specifically technical education.
I have some experience teaching in high school, and when he said they could really use people like me in Kenya, it resonated.
I would like to go back to the industry once I'm done with the PhD, but I don't think about the industry as endgame.
I'd like to eventually be an educator, or someone who contributes to educational programs and processes.

So, my lab mate tried to mansplain to me that Python is faster than C/C++.
It took all my self control not to smack him in the face with a chair.
Using Numba means it's no longer interpreted as Python, so it doesn't count.

Apparently the German word for doing agonizing IT work is PhD.