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Discussion on: What are some lesser-known roles and specializations within software development?

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Yuan Gao

devops robotics engineer. I didn't have this title, but I've definitely filled this role before. A lot of robotics stacks for larger distributed systems are dockerized for ease of deployment. It's done for the same reason it's done in the backend - good for avoiding dependency hell; makes it easy and consistent to deploy.

And as it happens, because they're dockerized, they can be built and deployed by a CD system in exactly the same way as backend stacks. While CI is not so easy, CD does make sense as far as pushing those new images to the robot's computer cluster, though you obviously don't want to try to reboot the robot while it's in the middle of doing something; but the images are there for the next experiment or next run.

So we have this weird cross-over position where this job requirement is a combination of traditional devops skills as well as robotics experience.