Fig. 1 - Current Kennedy HQ
As you can see, old bricks are not the future, and the architects knew this. After apparently watching some good scifi movies, a new concept for the central building emerged.
Fig. 2 - Picture I took of the new HQ design
And I am happy to say the building is already in construction, and badged individuals visiting the center may see its progress:
Fig. 3 - Picture of new HQ in construction, taken from inside the old HQ building looking through the window.
Peachy. Now, how does this tie in with developers, handmade dev, or anything with this site? Surprisingly, the man leading the design & construction of these new buildings is not only a fan of Handmade Hero, but follows Handmade Dev and the site very closely. His name is Scott Hunt, and Andrew and I had the pleasure of meeting this humble individual for lunch last Friday. During said lunch, Scott gave us a brief history of his time at NASA and it was fascinating. Hopefully he can give us a better background on a post of his own one day, but he is a mechanical engineer who has taken advantage of the opportunities presented to him, always looking out for the hard challenges. Starting as a co-op in 2003 or 2004 at around 17, he went from a student to a lead engineer—designing our most important buildings—at 29 years old (under 30 omg). In his spare time, he has programmed feature-rich game engines and has gotten fairly far with them, but he always felt at the back of his mind that he might be “doing something wrong” whenever his code wouldn’t meet some criteria prescribed by idioms or the patterns provided in books. Like so many of us, that sense of inadequacy quickly dissipated after seeing Casey Muratori’s blog posts or following Jon Blow’s musings. And of course once Handmade Hero started, and Handmade Network springing up a year later, he feels immense satisfaction again with his hobby programming and reading up on like-minded developer's thoughts.
Fig. 4 – From right-to-left: A full-time NASA engineer, a co-op student, and a promising intern.
After a tour of his office (and the selfie with the new HQ building in the back), the three of us discussed the value of caring about your work. Scott lamented the influx of young STEM people taking their jobs for granted, and not having a burning desire to accomplish tasks the right way, and figuring out what that right way means in context. But Scott saw hope in Andrew, who has shown to be a hard-working intern, and he saw hope in me (I hope? He hasn’t seen any of my streams yet), and most of all Scott saw hope in the handmade community. Let that sink in, please? It is you guys creating these projects, you guys caring about the best possible way to do things, you guys posting well-thought-out technical posts, you guys being unafraid to ask all the burning questions in your heart on these forums that’s beginning to attract the attention of seemingly unlikely allies. Scott has offered his time and support to the degree that he is able to in order to advance our mission.
Let’s make Scott proud, shall we?
-Abner
