Dr. Dobb's Journal October 2006
Employer: Zeidman Consulting and Zeidman Technologies
Job: Visionary/Everything Guy
DDJ: What exactly do you do at your two companies?
BZ: Zeidman Consulting provides consulting on hardware and software design issues to large and small companies. It is also involved with intellectual property litigation support: researching patents, trade secrets, copyrights, examining in detail the hardware and software of high-tech products, writing reports, and testifying in court. I'm the sole employee and do all the work, including the billing and bookkeeping.
DDJ: And Zeidman Technologies?
BZ: Zeidman Technologies creates software tools for engineers. I guess I'm "the visionary." I created the company and conceived the product line. I designed the products, wrote the patents, created the original prototypes, and I now oversee development. I also am the main sales person and operations manager and I still do the mundane tasks like billing and bookkeeping.
DDJ: What do you like about your job?
BZ: In both positions I get to come up with really great products that many people say have no market—then I market them and do fairly well. I love the engineering challenges. I love having final authority. I love working with great people who challenge me. And I love proving the naysayers wrong.
Employer: Restoration Robotics
Job: Director of Software Engineering
DDJ: What do you do at Restoration Robotics?
SQ: In addition to the usual software engineering tasks, one of my major responsibilities is the development and shepherding of advanced image processing and machine vision algorithms to help steer and guide our robot to do its magic.
DDJ: What do you find challenging about your job?
SQ: There is no device that does what our robot does, and that means that we definitely have some extremely challenging issues that need to be addressed. Secondly, working at a small company, particularly a startup, you have to be prepared to wear lots of hats and do whatever it takes to get the job done.
DDJ: What have you found that makes your job easier?
SQ: Most definitely Visual Studio .NET 2005. Just the ability to drill down into STL containers during debugging is worth the price of admission. But it goes beyond that. In some respects, our application is "data parallel," in the sense that at a high level, we can parallelize our compute-intensive loops. Hence, the inherent OpenMP support in VS 2005 has been a huge boon to effectively utilizing the Dual-Core PC that drives our robot. And there is the enhanced UI designer, added support for C++/CLI (no more of that awful double underscore syntax)—too much to mention.
Employer: Traveler.com.br
Job: IT Chief
DDJ: What do you like about your job?
JF: When I started working with hotel reservation and management systems in Italy, I found the combination of technology and travel to be very exciting. I especially like the daily challenge of heading the IT department of a startup company into a very fast-changing and competitive field.
DDJ: What in particular do you find challenging about that work?
JF: Travel-related computing environments in general are very heterogeneous because they have been evolving for almost as long as the modern computer itself. My main challenge is to get diverse non-GDS airlines mainframe systems, GDS systems, hotel, car rental, and travel systems all communicating a single standardized idiom, then making all this as transparent as possible to the end user.
DDJ: What have you found that makes your job easier?
JF: Three words: Open Source Software. Open standards, open platforms, and the best set of programming languages out there. Being loosely coupled to all technologies has also saved us enormous efforts when moving databases, datacenters, and web platforms. Currently we are working with a mix of XML, Perl, PHP, Apache, and the new 5.0 and 5.1-beta releases of MySQL, which are, to us, truly enterprise-ready. We are seriously considering Ruby for a particular web solution. We keep a close watch on the open-source Java-based enterprise solutions such as JBoss and Hibernate.