Robotics Welcomes Professional Software Developer

Parker’s FTC Robotics Teams 3507 and 9410, members of the Underwater ROV team and the robotics team mentors welcomed professional software developer Alex Wallace for a special working visit to discuss his work, team organization and ways to optimize code.

To kick off his time at Parker, Wallace shared his background and education, which led to an interest in programming and the intersection of computer science and finance at his banking job. “We were interested in talking to him about what a day in the life of a professional software engineer looks like,” said senior and Robotics Head of Outreach Star Rothkopf, “as well as the details of his team’s organization and the risks and necessary precautions when working with tens of millions of lines of code.” Next, Wallace worked with the dedicated programming subteams on the robotics teams to “help them sort out and clean up (‘refactor’) their code,” Rothkopf shared. Wallace described useful programming paradigms, such as object-oriented programming, and how to apply them to robotics.

Rothkopf shared, “We are so grateful to have had the opportunity to have Alex, a professional software engineer, come here and not only discuss his career but also give us some practical advice we can apply to our team, both programming and not.”

Parker is very thankful to Wallace for disclosing his real-life practical experience with our students.