Innovation and Ignorance

During my college years I worked at a defense contractor, but they weren’t just any ole’ defense contractor. They were a small team of talented folk that only built non-lethal technology to help our troops. Stuff like simulators and obscurants.

Nonetheless, I’d consider my first project there one of my most challenging yet successful projects. And by successful I’m referring to both the literal sense of finishing an awesome product on time and self growth… you know the kind of stuff that pushes you to the next level.

I was the sole software guy on an embedded system that launched smoke grenades. There was half a dozen of us building this thing from scratch and that covered project management, electrical & mechanical engineering, software and testing. I knew the project meant a lot to the company and they trusted me to write some great software for it, but I felt like I had no idea what I was doing.

I had a handful of commercial software projects under my belt and the first version of NetPoint was almost out the door. But I just graduated college, never wrote embedded software and I definitely had no experience with smoke grenades… well unless lighting smoke bombs on the 4th of July counts.

Over the next few months I brainstormed how our hardware and software was going to work with Derek, our electrical engineer and one of the most talented guys I’ve worked with. If you haven’t written embedded software before (and no, iPhone apps don’t count), it’s a different animal. You’re dealing with very low-level stuff, like figuring out whether you should send data in most or least significant bit order. A slight hiccup in timing can throw off the entire system. It’s really important for your hardware to align with your software or else things just won’t work.

For the next few months, I came into the office and chiseled away at a different piece of the project every day. We eventually demoed it to our customers and blew them out of the water.  And I later realized that feeling of not knowing what you’re doing is a good sign – it’s innovation at its best.  It means you’re stretching your limits and treading new territory, somewhere that not many people have been before.  If you’re fortunate enough, you might even be onto something that will change the world.  After all, there was no recipe for the light bulb, the combustible engine, or any of the great inventions we rely on today.  It took a lot of trial and error.

So the next time you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing, just remember you’re probably onto something great.