Writing software for space probes

A few days ago I quoted Ron Garret on his experience debugging software running millions of miles away. Since then I discovered a video of a talk Garret gave at Google a few weeks ago. He talks about remote debugging toward the end of his presentation, but most of his talk is about how NASA developed software for space probes during his time there.

More NASA posts

2 thoughts on “Writing software for space probes

  1. Interesting talk.

    In the Q&A (starting around 1:04) he talks a lot about NASA’s (the RAX team’s) problem of making itself appear relevant/important/necessary and getting buy-in from other groups. Seems like most (?) IT and Dev teams have similar problems, for similar reasons. So, the problem isn’t always, “how can i make the company better?”, but–more often–should be, “what can i do to get the company excited about what we are doing?”

    This actually makes me think about your comments from the other day about users prefering buggy software with 100% features over well-implemented apps that are missing a tiny bit.

    It’s not enough to just solve all the problems :). As programmers, we create tools… at the end of the day, business doesn’t really care about craftsmanship and ingenuity

  2. but my original point… Are people excited about the work i’m doing, or am i like NASA? they should be excited. it’s cool stuff, and it’s on me to make sure they know that

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