Back in 2017, I was just starting out as an intern at a Systems Design lab in a university. I was about to head into my first meeting with a potential advisor, when a college senior from my robotics club forwarded the link to DonkeyCar on the club group chat. IIRC, the first repo was hosted on wroscoe's personal account, and allenwells and AdamConway were the most active contributors, along with wroscoe of course.
I did not have any experience with Linux, Git, ML. Nothing! I walked into the meeting with the advisor and pitched working on DonkeyCar. It was new, it was shiny, it used TensorFlow v1! It was down to working on this, or some GIS thing, analyzing satellite spectral bands.
Anyways, my accidental blurring out of this project in the meeting led to the most fruitful summer of my life, where I managed to learn about package managers, machine earning, computer vision and how to ask the right questions on an open source communities Slack. I even remember badgering the project Slack so many times that wroscoe replies to me, saying that I should be more mindful about people's time, and that I should read the Python Error messages more carefully, before just copy pasting lines and lines of error code.
In addition to introducing me to Linux, this project introduced me to Deep Learning as well. I remember going through Josh Gordan's tutorials on KNN's, during my attempts to debug the Differential Drive DonkeyCar code. Ah the memories! One thing led to another, and I was following the launch of the first TPUs. I remember heading for lunch with a few folks from the department, where they began discussing the dedicated hardware that would be accelerating TF code. It was wonderful, as I tried to keep up with the announcements.
This brings back so many memories. If Will, Adam or Allan are reading this: Thank you. Your brilliant project absolutely changed my life and sparked a lifelong fascinating with robots, ML and tinkering!
Back in 2017, I was just starting out as an intern at a Systems Design lab in a university. I was about to head into my first meeting with a potential advisor, when a college senior from my robotics club forwarded the link to DonkeyCar on the club group chat. IIRC, the first repo was hosted on wroscoe's personal account, and allenwells and AdamConway were the most active contributors, along with wroscoe of course.
I did not have any experience with Linux, Git, ML. Nothing! I walked into the meeting with the advisor and pitched working on DonkeyCar. It was new, it was shiny, it used TensorFlow v1! It was down to working on this, or some GIS thing, analyzing satellite spectral bands.
Anyways, my accidental blurring out of this project in the meeting led to the most fruitful summer of my life, where I managed to learn about package managers, machine earning, computer vision and how to ask the right questions on an open source communities Slack. I even remember badgering the project Slack so many times that wroscoe replies to me, saying that I should be more mindful about people's time, and that I should read the Python Error messages more carefully, before just copy pasting lines and lines of error code.
In addition to introducing me to Linux, this project introduced me to Deep Learning as well. I remember going through Josh Gordan's tutorials on KNN's, during my attempts to debug the Differential Drive DonkeyCar code. Ah the memories! One thing led to another, and I was following the launch of the first TPUs. I remember heading for lunch with a few folks from the department, where they began discussing the dedicated hardware that would be accelerating TF code. It was wonderful, as I tried to keep up with the announcements.
This brings back so many memories. If Will, Adam or Allan are reading this: Thank you. Your brilliant project absolutely changed my life and sparked a lifelong fascinating with robots, ML and tinkering!