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Timothy Fosteman
Timothy Fosteman

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the sea is calling

i had a bit of an existential crisis with SDE career track. it's a bubble. not bursting fast enough. so i am off that ship until further notice.

i have 8 years professional experience in software engineering, and since the beginning of this 2026 i spent time working on integrating software for nio-robotics which made me think:

instead of hunting for a job as an SDE-1/2/3 i will be building a portfolio of subsea robotic exploration, unmanned autonomous vehicles who map and scan the stuff beneath the surface.

i really want to get to work on a vessel, somewhere in Pacific or Atlantic ocean, as a Surveyor specialist, an ROV engineer or something nascent.

And i want to make those ROVs next-level. Be able to debug software and eventually their hardware on the fly, deploy them, and deliver results for surveyors. So help me God.

Today, i will be setting up a devcontainer, because hey! my m2 macbook simply won't do well with ros2 jazzy and gazeebo stack simulating an ROV. or maybe it will, i just want a reproducible github repository as my main portoflio source so that anyone can simply launch the container at the end of the day, maybe even me, 6 months later, running this software stack i am building on a BlueROV2 or something... So here we go.

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