VoltSafe Blog Team – March 24, 2023

Itai Boss, Engineer, Marathoner & Ultimate Frisbee Champ

VoltSafe’s own Marathon Man, Itai Boss, Embedded Firmware engineering co-op, grew up knowing that he wanted to do something in tech, but wasn’t quite sure what exactly. He liked electrical engineering and programming but it wasn’t until the end of high school that he became interested in electronics and embedded systems. Embedded systems provided a playground of sorts that allowed him to work with hardware, build devices, and program them. In middle school he played around with Arduino kits but never really did anything with them. But that was then. Last summer he built a water turbidity sensor using an Arduino kit and had so much fun working on that project it compelled him to keep following the engineering trail. Even more recently, he continued to keep his brain busy by building a custom macropad this term.

 

Before arriving at VoltSafe, Itai’s work experience consisted of mostly on-campus jobs. He grew up in a university town, so his work experience was mostly in a lab environment. Working at VoltSafe is his first startup experience. The fast pace and teamwork means that he doesn’t have to worry about becoming bored with tasks. There are constant pivots due to the nature of a startup environment where priorities constantly change.

He found VoltSafe’s technology exciting from the moment he started here and enjoys coming in to work everyday and interacting with the prototypes. Being able to work on the programming for VoltSafe’s products has allowed him to take a peek under the hood and see how it all works. He’s had the opportunity to work closely on the VoltSafe Marine firmware and believes the company’s marine solution will transform the industry. He’s also blown away by the home product and how it will give the user control of their energy usage at the electrical outlet. Itai is anxiously awaiting the product to hit the market so he can have it in his home.

What Itai finds exciting about working on the firmware for VoltSafe Marine is that his work will one day make it into the hands of the public. It is this idea which drives him to commit his full effort to each task and strive to do his best.

He works closely with Embedded Software Engineer, Adrian Scillato, on VoltSafe Marine.  Itai considers the opportunity to work with someone of Adrian’s caliber a great benefit because of the vast amount of experience and knowledge that Adrian has. Itai feels comfortable turning to Adrian at a moment’s notice to help resolve firmware issues he comes across. Itai noted that Adrian has provided him with some valuable insights and has taught him about tradeoffs, such as doing things a certain way in order to optimize memory or CPU usage. These are practical skills that Itai feels he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to learn at school.

Other than the tech, Itai also enjoys the working environment at VoltSafe. The culture is not only fun but very diverse, which means that staff are not short on topics for lunchtime conversations. Itai credits Power Electronics engineer Keenan Bell for bringing not only the most interesting lunches but also the most interesting topics for discussion to the lunch table. But his most memorable moment at VoltSafe has to be during a recent office cleanup. After a very busy year of building prototypes that were CES ready and an equally busy winter season, it was time for the staff to get together and help tidy up our office. After discovering some Nerf paraphernalia in the closet, Itai and the VoltSafe engineering team decided to partake in a little Nerf battle.

 

When not doing his co-op thang at VoltSafe, Itai loves to run around Vancouver… literally. Since moving to Vancouver, he’s fallen in love with the outdoor, active lifestyle that Vancouver offers. The mountains and trails throughout the area provide the appropriate terrain for him to train with his running buddy. They are currently training for his first marathon, which happens to be a measly 50k. But Itai is no stranger to running. He participated in a cross-country competition in high school and during his gap year, he hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to his hometown of Maine. As he puts it, “I just walked home”. Ever since, he has yearned to do more outdoor cardio-heavy activities. He’s involved in a running community as well as an ultimate frisbee group with former VoltSafe co-ops, Adam Beckie and Evin Li. After he completes the 50k marathon he will be taking things easy by joining VoltSafe’s staff for the Vancouver Sun Run.

This summer he’s looking forward to working on a robotics project at UBC which will involve building a robot for autonomous navigation. As he heads back to school at UBC, the one thing he will be taking with him are the tips and tricks that he picked up from Adrian at VoltSafe. Most importantly, code management and code organization. He had a chance to see the importance of code management and recalls a team project at school that could have benefitted from it. Adrian demonstrated how code management and organization done in a specific way improved workflow and allowed you to identify changes made at a glance. Debugging tricks, memory usage and cleaning up memory were also useful lessons that Itai will take away with him as he returns to school.  

Sounds like Itai will have a lot to share with his classmates when he returns to UBC. If you would like to join our coop program and receive mentorship from one of our senior engineers, check out our careers page or follow us on LinkedIn.