Why I Joined Viam 🤖

Hello Friends I am excited to announce that I have joined Viam as a Developer Advocate where I will be working to help developers make cool robots. At Viam, we are building a software platform to enable users to create, configure and control any robotics project.

There are a lot of reasons I switched over to Viam, but here are the biggest:

I get to help make the future of robotics more accessible to everyone.

Robot balancing on one foot while doing the flying crane pose from Karate Kid.

I think we all know that robotics has the potential to do so much good, but progress has been slowed by complicated hardware and software integrations, long development cycles, and people’s fear of tripping over a robot on their way to work. At Viam, I am helping make the developer experience of building robots even easier.

Our goal at Viam is to make building and programming a robot as simple as assembling web services. To this end, we are developing a series of core hardware abstractions and software components, such as object recognition, navigation, and gripping. To make building and programming robots as simple as assembling a set of legos.

The team understands the importance of developers.

Cartoon of a person typing at a computer.

Cartoon of a person typing at a computer.

The team here at Viam is made up of a diverse team of developers, robotics engineers, and executives that have a history of building and scaling companies that understand how crucial developers are to succeed. I think this is most clear in Viam’s CEO, Eliot Horowitz, who was the co-founder of MongoDB. In my humble opinion, MongoDB’s success was directly tied to Eliot’s commitment to making a database that software developers loved through developer support, and features that developers were actually asking for.

The team Eliot has assembled here at Viam is equally committed to building a robotics platform that makes robots as easy to build as it was to deploy a MongoDB database. Personally, I am humbled and honored to be asked to join a team as committed to building tools for nerds.

Robots are just super fun.

I don’t think it’s a secret that I love exploring technology projects that blur the line between art and tech. Folks might also know that I have a special love in my heart for projects that walk the razor-thin line between genius and dumb as hell (i.e. see my IoT Kitty Litter Box). The fact is making a robot is really fun. It’s concrete and tangible in a way that software can’t be. It’s a blast making a robot that solves a real-life problem or is just fun to show off to my friends. I can’t believe it’s my job to be able to help all developers find this joy while I get to make and show off my own fun demo robots.

Our Plant Lab to test out fleet level smart hydroponics setup using Viam.

A four wheeled robot ready to be driven around remotely.

Viam intern, Olivia Miller, works on developing a Plantbot that waters the plant when it's dry.

Wrap up:

Viam is currently in stealth but we are building something really cool that we will be sharing with the world later this year. So if you want to keep updated on the very latest developer news from me and Viam, be sure to follow @ViamRobotics on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram.

We are also hiring! If you want to work with robots (or with me ), be sure to check out all of our open positions at https://www.viam.com/careers.

You can also follow me on my personal social accounts, it’s where I post about tech, leadership, and community. Oh, and I also post silly videos about programming. See you there!