I was working on the Lightroom engineering team at the time and Adobe was heading towards killing the project in favor of a Bridge + Photoshop solution.
When Apple announced Aperture, it instantly galvanized the executive support in favor of Lightroom and Shantanu made the call for us to announce Lightroom and ship a public beta in 6 weeks.
Thankfully we ran the engineering team with an iterative and low technical debt threshold. We had been shipping iterations to a private beta group.
The Lightroom public beta beat Aperture to the market, ran on PowerPC and Intel (Aperture was only on Intel Macs), and was much much faster.
I interviewed with DuckDuckGo a few months ago and their founders, investors, and board are not looking for the quick payout. They are more intent at a self sustaining alternative to Google.
I agree with the blog posting: "One of the criticisms of machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches to the study of data is that both are “black box” technologies, which can provide useful automated answers but which do not provide human interpretable output, and for which it is often not possible to understand how they are doing what they are doing."
Ayasdi | Full-stack Engineer - App Platform | Menlo Park, CA | Full-time, ONSITE
Ayasdi is a leading enterprise AI/ML company.
Ayasdi uses a pioneering approach to automatically discover insights from complex data. Founded in 2008 after a decade of research at Stanford, DARPA, and NSF, Ayasdi uses Topological Data Analysis (TDA) to unify best-of-breed machine learning approaches into a common framework without the need to write algorithms, queries or models. We’re building a platform to solve some of the world’s most complex data problems, are well funded by top-tier VCs and have a passionate team with a great culture.
As a Fullstack Engineer – App Platform at Ayasdi you will join the team creating Intelligent Applications, and Ayasdi Envision https://tinyurl.com/ayasdi-envision which makes the creation of intelligent applications easy for our customers. You will work to solve challenging UI/UX problems related to intelligent applications. Our stack is React/Redux/WebSockets/Django/Python. We build a reusable UI component framework and a Django app framework communicating over WebSockets. You will develop ambitious and novel solutions to hard problems, and your attention to detail motivates you to do the unglamorous work that leads to a stable, refined product. You are smart, friendly, and you enjoy working with others to pursue a common goal.
Ayasdi is a hot late stage startup in AI/machine learning/machine intelligence. Our core technology is Topological Data Analysis. Our Healthcare vertical app is making a big difference in care path management.