Becoming An Inventor

When I was a little kid, people would ask me, "Where do you want to go to school?" And I would say, "MIT!"

When I was a little kid, people would ask me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And I would say, "An Inventor!"

When I went to college, people ask "What do you want to learn about?" And I would say, "Artificial Intelligence!"

I went to a state school. I graduated and became a consultant. I did a pretty good job for awhile. But as more time passed and I found myself wanting more. For better or worse, I became obsessed with AI. I studied for the GRE to go to grad school. I took online courses. I did tons of tutorials and built beginner robotics kits. I applied to lots of schools and lots of jobs and got lots of rejections. Eventually, I built a project called the "Build Butler" and one day, I realized I had been using an iRobot Create 2 for months and thought, "I wonder if they need my skills?"

I applied for a data engineer position, passed a take home assignment, and landed the job. I took a giant risk moving from DC to Boston to work for iRobot where I would work side by side with MIT grads and other advanced degree holders. It turns out, years of practical software engineering skills are very useful to a company full of researchers, scientists, and academics!

At iRobot, we built a world-class petabyte-scale data platform at a fraction of the cost of off-the-shelf options. I witnessed multiple female-led teams grow and change the way a company looked at data. I built “Coolio, the cold brew penguin” Slackbot to tell us when we were out of coffee before making the long trek of disappointment and had a blast totally over-engineering a mundane problem. And I built data pipelines for mapping and spatial data and wrote algorithm to power the “recommended keep out zone” feature which was patented, making me an inventor!

There is a lot more to this story. But for right now, I'll just say, "I'm open for work."