Terry Smith’s Post

After an unexpected layoff at the end of the year and a relaxing holiday season I'm looking for a brilliant team doing interesting, cutting edge work to join. I have been a principal software engineer, integrated very interesting devices on very capable platforms, mentored junior engineers, and done sales engineering and business dev in many, many time zones. If you know someone who might have an interesting role please let me know!

Congratulations to the whole Tidal team for this recognition! It has been an honor to represent Tidal around the world for the last couple of years, and see where this amazing technology fits and where it will grow.

Here at X, the moonshot factory we say “get into the real world fast” and “be scrappy”—so, when I found myself about to spend 10 days in the ocean on a 2-mast, 120 foot Indonesian Pinisi working Tidal’s latest Blue Carbon experiment and realized half our equipment was delayed in customs, I had to get creative.  In cooperation with CSIRO, the Australian and Indonesian governments, my team and I traveled to some of the most beautiful and expansive seagrass meadows in the world with Tidal’s stereoscopic cameras, looking for ways to capture images of seagrass to then estimate their biomass and carbon capture potential—and create a system to track seasonal and long term changes. To deal with the shipment snafu, we found some PVC, bamboo and rope in the local village, and made use of a book of knots I keep in my carry-on (Square Lashing, page 140). We got into the water for shakeouts with a contraption dubbed “JankySled”, and were all ready to sail when our equipment finally showed—and then our real work began.  My job in the field was to gather clear, varied seagrass imagery data for Tidal’s amazing data science team—keep everything running smoothly and meet challenges with a smile (and my very heavy bag of tools). Thanks Lorraine, Dustin, Danny and Evan for teaching me the ways of fieldwork on the ocean, your lessons come in very handy!  After 10 long days of science in remote and beautiful waters, we came home with tons of data and tons of ideas to tease answers from it. I’ve been with Tidal at X for almost exactly a year, and I’m impressed daily with the breadth of knowledge here at the Moonshot Factory and X’s approach to testing and prototyping. I’m looking forward to inventing new technologies, methods, and techniques to help the ocean and the people who rely on it. So much thanks goes to the Tidal team that got everything together and deployed. And the team members in the field - Bianca B., Hector Yee, and Stephen Jarrell, were first rate and inspiring, and we'll be doing some great things together in the near future! You can read more about our work (and the trip) in the latest story from the MIT Technology Review: https://lnkd.in/dcpjn3_a

A photo crew from Boeing Frontiers magazine captured some great images of a Wave Glider experiment near Ventura, California last July. https://lnkd.in/gYe_7hx