Abstraction, but for robots
Ryan welcomes Simone Kalmakis, VP of Engineering at Viam, to dive into how her team is bridging the gap between software and robotics, the importance of abstraction layers in making robotics more accessible, and the real-world applications of robotics from lobster traps to industrial sanding robots.
Episode notes:
Viam is a robotics platform that brings modern software development tools into hardware applications.
Connect with Simone on Linkedin.
This week’s shoutout goes to Lifejacket winner Sergey Kalinichenko for their answer to How does this K&R code for reading an int work?.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
The company making it easier to turn your coffee machine into a robot
Listen to our previous episodes with Eliot here and here.
Viam is a software platform for building, monitoring, and managing data from smart machines, including industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, smart home appliances, and IoT devices. Get an overview of the Viam platform or dig into their docs.
Connect with Eliot on LinkedIn.
Three cheers for Stack Overflow user mattl, who won a Great Question badge with How to remove all contents of a directory using Golang?.
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The robots are coming… but when?
Despite our hope for the power of robotics, the technology is still far from mainstream. That’s because the amount of effort needed to get hardware to do useful things at scale is…well…hard.
When Eliot started Viam, his goal was to address this challenge by creating software that supports a range of hardware builds right out of the box. As the company explains - “we’re addressing these issues by building a novel robotics platform that relies on standardized building blocks rather than custom code to create, configure and control robots intuitively and quickly. We’re empowering engineers – aspiring and experienced – across industries to solve complicated automation problems with our innovative software tools.” The company announced the opening of its public beta earlier this week.
While Eliot elaborates on his vision for Viam, Ben reflects on his time covering drones for The Verge and working on robotics at DJI.
Inquisitive badge winner, Neeta, gets props for asking well-received questions on 30 separate days.
Follow Ben and Eliot on Twitter.
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All Your Data is Base
Sara reveals that she won a $500 gift card at a MongoDB hackathon, building an app that removed mustaches from people's pictures. This was many years ago, and no we were not paid in JetBlue gift cards to have Eliot on the show, although MongoDB is a client of Stack Overflow in other areas.
Mongo comes from humongous, cause, ya know, scale. That, plus HumongousDB.com was already taken and is a real mouthful to say.
Eliot talks about the frustrations he and his co-founder, Dwight Merriman, experienced while working together at DoubleClick and ShopWiki. DoubleClick began as a New York City ad tech company and evolved into the heart of Google’s real-time ad business after being acquired.
Frustrations with the database systems available at both these companies led the pair to decide it was time for a better mousetrap. Today, MongoDB is a public company worth north of $7 billion and a staff of more than 1900 people
We chat about why relational databases are still the core of computer science education in high school and college across the United States, and whether or not this will ever change.
During the show we skimmed some of the latest questions on Stack Overflow related to Mongo. Eliot took it back to his team and Tom Hollander, the PM for Mongo's chart product, delivered a great answer! Can you believe this website is free?
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MongoDB, NoSQL, Web Scale (Interview)
Steve and Wynn sat down with Eliot Horowitz from 10gen to talk about MongoDB, the NoSQL landscape, and the fun of building at Web Scale.
Join the discussion
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Featuring:
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Steve Klabnik – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Eliot Horowitz CTO and Co-Founder of 10gen
Dwight Merriman CEO & Co-Founder at 10gen
NoSQL is a loose term for Key Value Stores, Graph Databases, and Document Databases
MongoDB still has a large roadmap ahead
MongoDB was first featured on The Changelog over a year ago
Single server durability tops the list of new additions in 1.8
Replica sets are an elaboration on the existing master/slave replication, adding automatic failover and automatic recovery of member nodes
Shutterfly and Foursquare boast some of the largest MongoDB implemenation
MongoDB’s sharding enables horizontal scaling across multiple nodes.
Mongo vs. Riak (and other Dynamo inspired stores)
Full vs. eventual consistency
Compound indexes
Increment operations
Be sure and check out our Riak interviews: Part 1 and Part 2
Mongo vs. CouchDB
Couch uses Map/Reduce views
Couch has great master-master replication
Couch runs on mobile
Mongo’s sharding is closer to a relational database
Mongo’s Geo features now support more precise, spherical geospatial indexing
Mongo shines at
User profiles
CMS data
Mongo enjoys wide language binding support
Eliot and 10gen think the Web Scale meme is all in good fun
BSON [bee · sahn], short for Binary JSON, is a binary-encoded serialization of JSON-like documents
Our interview with Douglas Crockford on JSON
MongoDB 2.0 will be focusing on concurrency, aggregation, online compaction, and TTL temporal collections
Eliot likes Racket when he’s not slinging C.
Linus Torvalds is one of Eliot’s heroes
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
