Gergely Orosz#820
“Wow, y’all at NASA seem to actually have a purpose”. @kelseyhightower - former Google Distinguished Engineer and industry legend - on the moment he realised tech could do more:
"I remember spending time with Jet Propulsion Labs, part of NASA. I was so excited because the movie The Martian had just wrapped up filming there.
They gave me a tour of the facility, like the Mars Rover, the new one before they launched it to Mars - they were QA-ing it and it was just going in a circle around the track, and it had a little laser on there so it could split rocks. And they were showing me how they improved the wheels over time.
I went to another lab and there were a bunch of scientists working there, and it looked like a fish tank because they determined that if you want to replicate parts of Mars surface, and I might be getting this wrong, that the rocks that you find in a fish tank, they can replicate some of this stuff.
So I'm watching these people work, and he showed me how spacecraft has evolved over the last 20 or 30 years. And I'm like, wow, you all seem to have an actual purpose.
For the first time, I've seen people using technology not to just make more apps, not to add numbers in a database, but to actually have humanity do something.
And so they were not all about Kubernetes and Docker and Python and Go.
They were like, we're just trying to get a person to Mars and back again.”
