The two instances that are equal rank of the most fulfilling work I've ever done have three key things in common - a small cross-functional team, emotional inve

The two instances that are equal rank of the most fulfilling work I've ever done have three key things in common - a small cross-functional team, emotional investment in the outcome, writing software that makes hardware do something interesting. The next closest instance missed that emotional investment (it was _just_ work) and even though everything else was great, it wasn't fulfilling enough. The first was my Ph.D. writing path planning algorithms for autonomous vehicles. We drove robots autonomously across an entire farm. We ran trials combining data from ground and aerial vehicles in real-time. I flew in a helicopter telling the pilot where to go based on instructions from a GUI I wrote that was receiving data from the ground vehicle running my path planning code, sending its data back up to me via a datagram I specified and a threading and networking library I designed. It was a great team of people, and the core group of five of us is still in touch and sporadically working together a decade later. The second was the early years of my company, Cubescape, which makes Escape Rooms that run without a human game-master. I spent my thirtieth birthday crouched in a pile of dust debugging why a DMX controlled light wasn't properly flashing out a morse-code sequence, and why one particular Raspberry Pi would reboot after our strobe light kicked in. (Nope, not current draw - turns out if you hit the right chip with the right frequency of light, the photoelectric effect can cause a voltage drop. We covered it up with duct tape...) These days I've mostly automated myself out of a job so even though it's my baby, it's still less fulfilling than those early periods. Everything else I've ever done in (work) life has been less fulfilling than these journeys, and it's really only through a recent period of deep introspection that I've managed to connect the dots and nail down those three key requirements. I'm now looking for what might be next, and using those as a filter on the opportunities - if you think your company fits, please reach out!