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Are you a tech hero?

dougw

Hero - a person who combats adversity through feats of ingenuity among other things...

It isn't often we think of technical people as heroes, but they perform qualifying acts all the time. It is easy to think of technology as having little human element. It isn't just about technology making our lives better, it is also people who use technology to help others. This discussion is just about celebrating everyday tech heroes.

I thought it would be interesting to read anecdotes and stories about how you helped someone with your technical knowledge or saved the day with your technical expertise.

It could be simply someone who was stuck on a problem or at a loss of how to proceed or fix something and you made their life easier. Little acts of technical kindness do make a difference and it is fun to spend a little time pondering this aspect of technology...

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  • Good question Doug!

     

    Back in 2009, I was hired as a firmware engineer at a life science equipment company to help out in a imaging based project.  Being the new guy, I was tasked with a bunch of tasks around the edges of the product, but I noticed a near daily heated conversations about how to improve the image processing algorithms that were developed by a consultant.  I quietly listened, watched and read information on the issues.  Then one weekend, on my own time, I developed a demonstration program, written in Visual Basic, that could process the existing captured image and use simple image processing function to improve the quality of images and also perform proper segmentation of objects in the images.  The following Monday morning, when the daily conversation started, I asked if I could share with them a little program that I developed.  To say the least, they were blown away.  A visual overlay showed that almost every object was extracted from the image.  I was immediately tasked to take over the image processing code development.  It took awhile, but I was able to develop a working algorithm that was able to meet all of the project specifications (accuracy and throughput).  In the process, I developed a patent for utilizing multiple images, at different planes of focus, to improve the accuracy of categorizing object types (which became the basis for additional improvements to the instrument in the areas of improved focusing and improved accuracy of object extraction). 

     

    To make this story even more interesting, to that time, I had never been involved in any form of image processing.  I simply read everything I could find and quickly came up with some simple functions and put them all to together.

     

    Throughout the project, I worked with the junior engineer that had been thrown into the project, and encouraged him to participate in the direction of the development.  We would bounce ideas back and forth, then I would go off and develop code to effect the changes.  We became great friends, as opposed to being rivals.

  • in reply to genebren

    You are incredibly true. It is what happens very frequently to me. I think that a habit that is unfortunately uncommon in many engineers, is just trying to change the perspective to find the solution. And, eventually (but hopefully), abandon all the academic standardized (by whom?) approach that rarely can be applied to real cases. And I rarely too, I saw working.

     

    Enrico

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  • in reply to genebren

    You are incredibly true. It is what happens very frequently to me. I think that a habit that is unfortunately uncommon in many engineers, is just trying to change the perspective to find the solution. And, eventually (but hopefully), abandon all the academic standardized (by whom?) approach that rarely can be applied to real cases. And I rarely too, I saw working.

     

    Enrico

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