Below are some of my key takeaways from reading the book, Radical Candor by Kim Scott. If you are interested in more detailed notes from this book, they are available here.
Radical Candor – Summary and Insights
Three Key Similarities Between Military Planning and Product Development
As I transitioned from active duty in the U.S. Marine Corps to a Product Management role at a robotics startup, I was intimidated by the steep learning curve I faced. While I had an academic background in engineering and tried to keep up with emerging technologies through various side projects, I had no idea what was required to launch a commercial product and scale it.
My new coworkers were quick to jump in and help me understand the differences between unit and integration tests or how to write a hardware Design Validation test plan, for example. Luckily, what was most surprising, was how much the fundamentals of planning a military operation resembled planning the development and launch of a new product, disguised under frameworks with different names.
At the end of the day, I realized one overarching principle: a military unit and a technology startup are both organizations that require decision making in ambiguous situations for survival.
They also share some other commonalities:
- Both place an emphasis on defining the problem before developing a solution.
- Both use divergent thinking to create several distinct plans, stress test them, and then converge on a single solution.
- Both ensure that the teams responsible for execution know both what to do and why they are doing it but are left to determine how to best do it.
Man’s Search for Meaning – Summary and Insights
Below are some of my key takeaways from reading the book, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. If you are interested in more detailed notes from this book, they are available here.
The Making of a Manager – Summary and Insights
Below are some of my key takeaways from reading the book, The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhou. If you are interested in my detailed notes from this book, please email me.
Measure What Matters – Summary and Insights
Below are some of my key takeaways from reading the book, Measure What Matters by John Doerr. If you are interested in more detailed notes from this book, they are available here.
Principles: Life and Work – Summary and Insights
Below are some of my key takeaways from reading the book, “Principles: Life and Work” by Ray Dalio. If you are interested in more detailed notes from this book, they are available here.
Peopleware – Summary and Discussion Guide
The questions below are meant to be used in a guided discussion on the book, “Peopleware: Productive Teams and Projects” by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. If you are interested in more detailed notes from this book, they are available here.
The Mom Test – Summary and Insights
Below are some of my key takeaways from reading the book, “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick. If you are interested in more detailed notes from this book, they are available here.
The Innovator’s Solution – Summary and Insights
Below are some of my key takeaways from reading the book, “The Innovator’s Solution” by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor. If you are interested in more detailed notes from this book, they are available here.
Using Cruise’s Webviz Tool to Visualize Autonomous RC Car System Data
In June of 2019, Cruise announced their data visualization web application, Webviz, in a blog post entitled, “Webviz: An Open Source Platform for Robotics Data Visualization.” This follows previous announcements to open source Worldview, a library to translate the data-rich worlds our cars navigate into clear and intuitive 3D scenes, and rosbag.js, a JavaScript library for reading ROS bag files.
The goal of the Webviz project was to streamline the data visualization workflow by presenting data in a more cohesive way, making layout customization much easier and maintaining backwards compatibility. What started as a Cruise hackathon project is now one of the most widely used data analysis tools at Cruise.
The web application contains configurable panels that can be used to visualize data including logs, camera feeds, 2D plots, and 3D scenes. This functionality is similar to native ROS tools such as RViz, rqt_runtime_monitor, rqt_plot, rqt_image_view, rostopic echo, and rqt_console but it doesn’t require the user to install ROS on the host machine. The configuration can be exported as JSON and shared with other users.
To visualize data, users have two options. By default, the Webviz tool tries to connect to a rosbridge_server using a WebSocket on ws://localhost:9090. For historical data, users can drag ROS .bag files directly into Webviz via the browser. All the data is processed and visualized locally, not sent to any server.
