Thank you very much -- I guess it's understandable given the tragic circumstances of his death, but Bob very much deserves to be remembered as you described him: an engineer's engineer. I first met him at Foo Camp in 2011, and we had a deeply enthralling conversation about building the Square reader. As it turns out, credit card swipes are (were?) fiendishly complicated! (I still tell others the advice that Bob gave me: for the best read, you want constant acceleration of your card -- not a fast swipe.) He showed me the tooling that he had built at Square to debug bad swipes; it was a role model for rigor in engineering and especially for the power of tooling. (Unsurprisingly, I was not the only person that had a conversation around this time and about this topic with Bob.[0])
dang: Thank you for the black bar today for Bob, a role model for us all who will be deeply missed.
Constant acceleration, or did you mean velocity? I'm imagining that the magstripe data must be unevenly spaced for constant acceleration to make sense?
No, I mean constant acceleration -- which is what made it surprising! (The constant acceleration made it much easier for the reader to determine the direction of the swipe, IIRC.)
dang: Thank you for the black bar today for Bob, a role model for us all who will be deeply missed.
[0] https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1643599340106301440