Day 164 of 1000
I love my new job. I am working on a new technology. When I first started in field of Machine Vision in 1983, that technology was very new and intriguing. Everyone knew it had a huge future, but because of the immaturity of the technology and the relatively slow speed of computers back then, it was hard to use it for even the easiests of task. Computers improved, machine vision algorithms got more sophisticated and ran faster on better hardware, and within five years things really opened up. Now, all the easy tasks have already been done. That is why I have had such an enjoyable career. I get to go around and try to make really hard stuff work.
I have enjoyed that a lot, but I forgot how much fun it was when the machine vision market was just starting to move. This new technology on which I am working makes 3D measurements easy and cheap compared to how it used to be. There is, again, a lot of low hanging fruit–easy jobs for this new technology–that have been waiting a decade for a solution because 2D machine vision technology just could not bear the burden of such difficulty.
The difference, this time, is that I am on the forefront of the development, not of the technology itself, but of the application of the technology. It is very invigorating. I got to work full time developing very interesting code and techniques. Then I get to take that stuff out to solve problems for which people have been literally begging for a solution. One engineer, last week, told me he had been trying to figure out a way to solve a hard problem in a very high-technology setting for 6-7 years. His company had spent a lot of money trying to figure it out and had pretty much given up. He thinks our technology will do the trick.
I am waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it might, but I will enjoy the ride until it does.