There's a pretty cool documentary called "I Dream of Wires" that covers the early history of electronic (in this case analog electronic) music. It has a bit about the Theremin as well as the early modular synthesizers. Saw it hit Netflix the other day - well worth a watch if you are interested in this stuff.
On the front end it's pretty cool since you are targeting internal tools you can assume modern browsers and use the latest frameworks and tech with zero legacy support to worry about. We look for people who have full stack experience and can be flexible and help out on any area of a large web application (including a some ops and continuous integration). Communication skills are super important - usually these projects are on small teams that need to work well together and support people within the company who use the tools. We also try to make sure people are good with details and are thorough in their ability to properly build and test their stuff - these tools are critical for the success of the mission so they are every bit as important as the code on board the vehicles.
SpaceX has a lot of open positions for web developers. It's kind of a misconception that it's all embedded work here or that you need an aerospace background. The web work is a little different because it's usually internal-facing but there are a lot of interesting problems. Definitely check it out.
That table of most expensive cities is interesting. Given how Proposition 13 works, the assessed value of places in various cities might be more a reflection of how actively things are turning over than how much they are actually worth. The old house we rent in Manhattan Beach has an assessed value of like $88,000 since the landlord has owned it forever but if we bought it the value would jump to like $1.7 million. It would be cool to integrate this data with estimated house values from Zillow to see how much that skew is per city.
I agree it's really tough to motivate kids to make games and program when they have massive instant libraries of high quality stuff online. My supply of good software was so limited growing up that it was easy to stay focused and build things. Now it's really hard to motivate kids with starter graphics programs and little interactive things. Hopefully the Minecraft tie-in will help overcome this. I'll give this a try with my 9 year old.
I worry about this a lot. There's archive.org doing an amazing job but it seems like so much of our culture is getting lost because it's online. My box of Popular Science magazines from the 1950s is amazing - even the ads are interesting. The difficulty in archiving this stuff is worrying, as is the discovery experience for someone 60 or 70 years down the road. I can pick up a crusty magazine and flip through it, cutting across a whole bunch of topics and their surrounding context. There are lots of silos trying to save bits of it, but if this guy put a bunch of papers in a box in 1997 and it didn't get eaten by mold, then all of it would have been around to browse today.
That's a fair point - his content is certainly compatible with the Common Core's standard. I was really venting about your point [2] and shouldn't have implicated the standard for that. Thanks for the references.
Anybody have experience with his site, greatcoderclub? That looks like an interesting way to get over the activation energy and build up some discipline for pushing out side projects.
This is the kind of experience would never be allowed with the Common Core type approach. I can't imagine people spending a classroom day on something like this (even though it's awesome and super valuable), but alas it's not content that will appear on the standardized tests.
I thought you tempered your use of "passionate" with specific examples that showed it wasn't exploitive or BS. It was clear you were looking for people who could write really high quality code and who had strong thoughts on what was right.
It's when you see "passionate" without any context that it becomes a turn off.
Are there any good apps for location-aware WiFi toggling? I rarely use WiFi outside of home or work so I'd like it to turn itself off to avoid stuff like this.
Your phrase, "utter arbitration" doesn't make sense - that word is about settling disputes. You could say "This number comes from my intuition (and is a little arbitrary), I assume..."
The newer posts on there are the digital equivalent of graffiti. The original Linux post is clogged with a bunch of junk as well. It's always upsetting to see traffic driven to these posts leading to trash from visitors.
If you're on a large display the Get Started button seems like it's broken if you don't notice the color change down below. I noticed after I clicked it a few times.
Yeah same here. I wish I had given up on Scala and used something more familiar to me. I kept having my index serialization randomly die and it wasn't very clear what was going on. It was great to get a taste of the language, though.
I don't think you need to learn Ada! Take a look at our Reddit AMA for some details about what we use - http://www.reddit.com/comments/1853ap. There are a lot of different paths people have taken to get to the software team here, so a strong background with open source on some meaty distributed systems projects in Linux sounds like a good starting point.
It's cool to see so many people excited about this launch. Just wanted to remind people that we have a lot of software job openings right now. People are often surprised to learn that SpaceX is hiring web developers -http://www.spacex.com/careers/position/3890. There are some interesting internal tools projects that are critical parts of each mission. We have embedded developer, PM, and test roles open as well.
My 8 year old has only experienced real-time broadcast television when staying at a hotel, where he was frustrated and perplexed that we couldn't rewind it (he has no clue where the concept of rewinding really comes from). He has always experienced media he can control on YouTube or Netflix. I can't imagine he'd ever subscribe to something like cable in the future. Maybe if TV could associate itself with Minecraft somehow they could reach this cohort, but I suspect it's a lost cause.
C++ tried to use template specialization with std::vector<bool> to take advantage of bool-ness and provide a dense storage for bits, but it suffers for reasons Linus points out here, namely the inability to cleanly address individual elements of the vector (so it doesn't behave exactly like a normal std::vector).
I agree and use the ThinkPad USB keyboard on my desktop machines - they are great ergonomically, especially if you ditch your mouse. It seems like the USB interface is super cheapie though with lots of missed key presses, or an occasional stuck key. I'd pay a premium for the ThinkPad form factor with higher quality electronics.
It's hard to say what works best since we have so many different backgrounds on the team. I think having an interesting portfolio of projects (professional or side / hobby type stuff) is important - make sure you've done some awesome stuff that you can map onto what you might do here. Also, hone your communication skills. A big part of success at SpaceX is being able to work with others in a team and quickly get ideas across. Getting an internship is definitely a good way to go - we usually give interns pretty meaty projects that are a good taste of what full-time work might be like. Good luck!
I've been on the Flight Software team at SpaceX for a little over three years. It feels a lot like a startup. The team is still relatively small and people are pretty passionate about what they are working on. The project variety is wide as well. Personally, I've gotten to work on low-level drivers and OS stuff, application code that runs on the vehicles and ground systems, Dragon's fault-tolerant platform, internal web-based tools, and operations in Mission Control during the Dragon missions. Can't really give details about any of this stuff but I do love working here.
There was an AMA with several of the software teams a little while back:
There are several openings right now for software engineers, including people with web experience (people usually don't think we're looking for those skills):
On ThinkPads the bright yellow USB ports are ones that are powered even when the computer is turned off. You can use these as charging ports for phones and other devices. Usually only a subset of the ports are powered like this and marked yellow, so this isn't a feature primarily designed to make it easy to plug stuff in correctly.