New Mentor: Richard Amerman

[sirfifer]

Yup, that is me!

There might be a better place to share info with the entire team, but for the sake of the development team and getting some momentum going, I'll start here.

I'm an IT Systems Engineer at a Music Company, CD Baby.

I have worked in tech for over 30 years and have done many things, but have spent most of that time as a developer and architect, but have been focusing on system engineering for the past 10 years.

While I'm rusty on the development side, I used to work with Python for a living. It will be great to have an excuse to get back up to speed.

As we discussed, I have laptops. I'll start a separate discussion on those, but to start, I will have two laptops of my own with me at all times, the main one running Ubuntu Linux, the secondary, windows.

Here are some of the topics I'm interested in furthering, though I'm not sure how much of this will make sense in the context of this season. Much of it may end up as post/off season work/progress.

• Testing
• Documentation, including inline docs
• GitHub actions / build pipeline / CICD
• VM use for dev and control (ie VirtualBox)
• Improving debugging and QA

Some additional background:
I grew up in Sitka Alaska
I was in the Army for 4 years, the Old Guard, the Presidential Honor Guard
I have been a musician all my life, originally was studying to be a music teacher. I'm in a seasonal professional caroling troop, which is why I showed up at our last practice of 2024 in a tux, I had just come from a gig.
While I love just about all music, 80's alternative is a favorite.
I'm working on fleshing out a full maker space in my garage, full wood shop, 3D printing and plan to build a CNC over the next year, likely a V1E LowRider 4.
Three favorite video games include: Zelda BotW and TotK, Satisfactory, Cyberpunk 2077.
I go to PDXLan at least once a year.
I have a 13 yo son at Viewridge who I hope will join the team as soon as he hits High School.

Feel free to ask me any questions!

[ManicManiac64]

Hey Mr. Amerman!

Thanks for the introduction! We're all elated to have you as a mentor! I don't know much about things like CI/CD or QA (I kind of vaguely have an idea of what GitHub Actions is), but I think they'd be really cool to implement on the subteam. Like you said, I think a lot of it would be off-season work, since we're fully in the build season now. Very excited regardless!

-James

[sirfifer]

One thing I just thought to add, this is my 3rd account in GitHub.
I mainly bring this up as it is easy to see that this account is new and would seem odd.

I have an original account that is all about my old company (my own company) that does not exist anymore.
The other is for my current job/company.

It made sense to create a new account for moving forward, not just for robotics, but likely for everything non work related.