anastas's comments

Apologies for having to abbreviate some words in the title to fit into the title character limit.

I've seen questions and discussions around here about what staff/principal/etc engineers do and why (leveling terminology varying by company), including a fair and understandable amount of skepticism of its value; I thought that perhaps this recounting of my work and experience in that sort of position could be interesting to some. I have never posted one of my publications on social media like this before so I am interested to see how it is received, to engage on relevant topics, and to field some of said skepticism.

This is a case study I submitted to and was published for the XP 2022 conference, catching up after the COVID period. It marks my "drop mic" moment of switching from software engineering to machine learning engineering after IBM shut down the office where I worked for close to 6 years. I do highly recommend that conference, by the way, and the experience report track has an intentionally low barrier to entry that I am more than happy to chat about / advocate for because I believe that conference attendance/speaking should be much more normalized in our profession than it seems to be. (Call for submissions for XP 2023 is open until Feb 12 and only requires an abstract!).

UReddit was a proof of concept based on which we founded the nonprofit. The pitch is essentially that anyone that would like to teach should be free to do so, so we made a place where people can do that. Now, Dr. Donley, who taught the class the linked blog post is about, had been composing video lectures for two years, but he did use the UReddit platform to run two classes and receive more attention/recognition for his efforts and quality of execution. And now we'd like to make a technologically sophisticated platform that automated the busy work of teaching and is better suited to becoming a community.

Hello, I'm the UReddit admin and author of the linked post. I'm glad to see appreciation here for Dr. Donley's class.

As we say in the article, we are trying to put together a better platform for teachers to use when they want to teach with more freedom and with more rights to their intellectual property rights than they might have when doing it through a university, and so that they can have many parts of the teaching process automated in order to be able to focus on actually playing the roles of educators.

We're running a Kickstarter to help us get our prototype into beta, and we appreciate any and all support. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1918344721/open-compass

Just to have an area in which to develop, a number of powerful servers, is a pretty large cost, let alone the actual work being done; UReddit runs on a single Linode, this requires at least 4-5 powerful servers. (Note that our fundraising budget is not for ongoing costs such as renting servers, but for setting up a development environment and recruiting some help, on a contractor basis, for the development work.) We did try to be reasonable with the projected costs and even lowball estimates when we could.