Resigned to it
2016-05-16 16:20:41.645412+00 by
Dan Lyke
9 comments
I've sent the official email, so I guess I can leak it here: I believe Sonic is an
important company. I'm proud to have worked for a little over 4 years for an ISP that
regularly tops the EFF's list of companies most concerned with your privacy. I love that
Sonic has been putting the lie to this notion that ISPs doing bandwidth limiting is about
anything other than funneling customers into cable TV packages.
But I've been made an offer I can't turn down, and am resigning to pursue professional
growth that I cannot get with Sonic. Further details in a bit, but it involves the
transportation sector, geographic information, and "big data" that, hopefully, will get a
whole hell of a lot bigger. A chance to learn and grow, with some super smart people, get
me into the city (SF) more often, and pursue some new and interesting challenges.
[ related topics:
Privacy Technology and Culture broadband Free Speech Invention and Design Bay Area Television
]
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: Resigned to it made: 2016-05-17 09:38:25.339626+00 by:
DaveP
Congratulations on the new gig!
#Comment Re: Resigned to it made: 2016-05-17 14:02:29.334618+00 by:
meuon
Congratulations for not confusing stability with stagnation.
#Comment Re: Resigned to it made: 2016-05-18 01:20:23.283581+00 by:
Jack William Bell
Sounds to me like you are moving into my turf. Albeit I work closer to the metal.
#Comment Re: Resigned to it made: 2016-05-18 01:36:26.829592+00 by:
Dan Lyke
So the new employer is https://speedgauge.net/
#Comment Re: Resigned to it made: 2016-05-18 02:53:31.144857+00 by:
Jack William Bell
Yeah, they would be in competition with one of our product lines. But just one.
#Comment Re: Resigned to it made: 2016-05-18 16:39:36.886472+00 by:
Dan Lyke
Interesting, although it actually looks like their end-product is the sort of thing that'd
be built on top of the Airbiquity platform (there's some intermediate data collection and
processing that's likely common functionality to both, and that's what I'll be working on
scaling up).
#Comment Re: Resigned to it made: 2016-05-18 23:17:37.365165+00 by:
Jack William Bell
[edit history]
Yeah, our solutions are end-to-end. So we have the back-end and the analytics and OEM/customer portals, but also the front-end with infotainment, data collection, OTA updates, and so on. Plus, for vehicles without TCUs and OEMs that want branded phone apps, we use 'brought in phones' as a data transport and user interface.
All of this is designed in such a way we can plug and play with other front-ends or middleware. The front-end could probably work with other back-ends as well, but ours is pretty feature rich compared to the competition so adapting to a different back-end would most likely require stripping out functionality.
My job is working with the vehicle systems and phone-based middleware; only I'm not a production developer–I'm R&D, so I get to play with new toys and protocols we want to support and do proof of concepts for new features. Plus design APIs, write white papers, do competitive analysis, and the like.
#Comment Re: Resigned to it made: 2016-05-18 23:55:44.494203+00 by:
Dan Lyke
Fun! Yeah, I may get sucked into a few things on the embedded end, but the initial projects
are going to be data management and analysis.
#Comment Re: Resigned to it made: 2016-05-19 04:35:56.920652+00 by:
Jack William Bell
Yeah, the data end of this sounds pretty interesting; lots of room for coming up with a way to combine disparate datasets that no one ever thought of before. Not so much on my end of things. (Although I do have some ideas–mostly about protocols.)
My only issue with all of this is the privacy end of things. The entire industry is building towards a future where your transportation will need tracker-blockers.