DEV-DIARIES

Dev Diary 2018-12-12

Work continues on the CoffeeOutside bot. Not going to have it done for tonight, but should be in action for next week. Every time I pick up Go, it’s the uncanny valley of “it feels like C, but…” I will say that it’s great working in a ‘batteries included’ environment again. I understand the trade-offs in maintenance upstream, but from a developer productivity view, it’s nice not having to read through grungy third-party code hoping it’ll fit the bill.

There were further problems with a prototype when it was put on display in a New York hotel for reporters to see.

The issue was that in dry weather, it was prone to a build-up of static electricity, which caused sparks to fly between its circuits, preventing it from working.

“To our horror it was a dry day and the engineers were setting this non-working machine up for our big story,” Ms Berezin said.

“Ed Wolf [our head of engineering brought] a full pail of water and without a word to anyone throws the pail of water over the whole thick carpet in the room.

“The water sank into the carpet, which stayed damp for three or four hours, and the machine worked perfectly.”