As Lyft’s VP of Engineering, Software at Level 5, Autonomous Vehicle Program, Anantha Kancherla has a birds-eye view on what it takes to make self-driving cars work in the real world. He previously worked on Windows at Microsoft focusing on DirectX, Graphics and UI; Facebook’s mobile Newsfeed and core mobile experiences; and led the Collaboration efforts at Dropbox involving launching Dropbox Paper as well as improving core collaboration functionality in Dropbox.

He and Lukas dive into the challenges of working on large projects and how to approach breaking down a major project into pieces, tracking progress and addressing bugs.

Check out Lyft’s Self-Driving Website:
https://self-driving.lyft.com/

And this article on building the self-driving team at Lyft:
https://medium.com/lyftlevel5/going-from-zero-to-sixty-building-lyfts-self-driving-software-team-1ac693800588

Follow Lyft Level 5 on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/LyftLevel5

Topics covered:
0:00 Sharp Knives
0:44 Introduction
1:07 Breaking down a big goal
8:15 Breaking down Metrics
10:50 Allocating Resources
12:40 Interventions
13:27 What part still has lots ofroom for improvement?
14:25 Various ways of deploying models
15:30 Rideshare
15:57 Infrastructure, updates
17:28 Model versioning
19:16 Model improvement goals
22:42 Unit testing
25:12 Interactions of models
26:30 Improvements in data vs models
29:50 finding the right data
30:38 Deploying models into production
32:17 Feature drift
34:20 When to file bug tickets
37:25 Processes and growth
40:56 Underrated aspect
42:34 Biggest challenges

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