Darpa, the Pentagon agency that started the Internet, had its annual computer-controlled car race in the couple of weeks. A team from Stanford won by piloting its car via computer over 132 miles in a little less than seven hours. The real story of the race is the team that finished fourth.
That team was from Gray Insurance. It was competing against teams from elite colleges and top defense contractors. The Gray team really accomplished miracles. First, they only decided to enter the race at the start of this year and didn't get their car until April. The guys who wrote the software were the IT department of the company, presumably regular application programmers. But, they would have to have been very, very good programmers to beat the competition they had. They picked up the specific knowledge needed by reading a lot. They bought as many top quality off-the-shelf components as they could and then wrote some code.
Just finishing this work was impressive enough. Being based in Metairie, LA, and thus battered by Katrina puts this achievement in almost a miracle class. The primary programmers should be noted: Keith Goeller, Paul Trepagnier and Jorge Nagel.
1 comment:
Thanks for the praise. It was a tough task given the tight timeline, but our team was top-notch. I am a J2EE programmer by trade and was the Software Development Manager for Team Gray. My other programmers besides Jorge Nagel were Matt Dooner and Powell Kinney.
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