Farewell, Voyage!

Today is my last day as a Voyage employee. Cruise acquired us, and I will start there next week. I’m excited to join Cruise, but leaving Voyage is bittersweet.

I started at Voyage three months ago, almost to the day, so my tenure has been short, but fun and memorable. I joined in large part because I was excited to work with a small, amazing group of engineers. Voyage lived up to expectations — my manager, as well as our VP of Engineering, and of course our CEO, Oliver Cameron, have all been terrific. I am happy to continue with them to Cruise.

Voyage accomplished an amazing amount for a small startup, just 60 people at its peak. The quality of the ride was impressive, and the team’s decision to start inside low-speed retirement communities cleverly reduced the complexity of the challenge.

When I joined, Voyage was already beginning to test driverless performance on our closed test track. By the time of the Cruise acquisition, progress was on-track to deliver an initial driverless service to paying customers this year.

I loved being able to download the entire autonomy stack, “Commander”, onto my machine and trace through everything from prediction to behavior planning to motion control.

Most of all, Voyage was an opportunity for me to return to production engineering after four-and-a-half years teaching at Udacity. Sliding back into a rhythm of engineering and reviewing code has been so nice and so comfortable, and I am grateful for the opportunity.

I look forward to Monday at Cruise!

Published

Originally published at http://davidsilver.blog on March 20, 2021.