I build the measurement algorithms inside industrial vision software — the geometry, calibration and edge measurement that factory applications are built on. C++, at Zebra Technologies in Montréal, on the Aurora Imaging Library, and at Matrox Imaging before the two became one company.
Most of that job is not writing the algorithm. It is agreeing what it should do with the UI, documentation and test teams before it ships, and then going into the applications customers cannot get working — which is where you find out what it actually does.
Outside work I build things that need data nobody publishes: a transit network for a country with no timetable, a robot cell for testing control code against real physics, two months of power-outage readings collected a minute at a time to find out whether the restoration times hold. The projects and articles are written up here with what each one taught me, including the parts that did not work.