I considered software programming and management to be a benign job–you know, a bug or two won’t hurt anyone, right? I’ve had the guilty pleasure of thinking that one solution to a programming error is to just hide it from sight and hope it never comes out again. Until now, it pretty much worked. However, after joining the Solar Car Team, I’m starting to see past the bubble of class project specifications.

In the world of solar car racing, the project specification is simple but hard: make it work; no exceptions, no assumptions. The programs that run for this team do not just execute for a couple of minutes to pass test cases; they run for days on end. The database keeping the telemetry of the solar car and the weather forecasts are crucial in determining the solar car’s operation. For example, the data from survey runs tell the team what the solar car will be facing in the road ahead, and the weather data is important in deciding the optimal battery power for the solar car. A single crash in this database could decide our fate, and I am here to make sure that does not happen. The weight cannot be any greater, but I’m ready to move my residence from a bubble to a….chase car!