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Over the last 20 years, Steve Lascos has resisted being pigeonholed as either a software engineer or a hardware engineer.
Instead, he’s employed tools and skills to master an industry that has evolved from custom silicon chips to integrated circuits and graphics processing units and is now trending back toward custom chips with artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators.
“I recognized early in my career that my passion was the field of digital signal processing (DSP),” says Lascos, who earned his B.Eng in computer engineering in 2004, then added a master’s degree with a focus on DSP in 2007.
“I also began to see that what you do in custom hardware today, someone will do tomorrow in software,” he adds.
That perspective has led him to his current role as manager of R&D with Algolux, a Montreal-based company using machine learning and AI to develop technology for autonomous vehicles.
“My team transforms the work of our computer vision researchers into real-time, robust software running on real hardware,” he says. “I combine my DSP background with modern software ‘best practices’ to fill in knowledge gaps of our younger engineers, and work with our senior team members to architect not just high performing software, but code that is both robust and maintainable.”
At the same time, Lascos continues to indulge the musical passion that first drew him to computer engineering.
“When I was 14, I bought my first electric guitar and wanted effects pedals to go along with it, but they were too expensive,” he recalls. “Then I learned that if you could solder and read schematics, you could build your own at a fraction of the cost.”
Today Lascos not only plays bass guitar in a garage band, he also runs his own business designing and building custom audio solutions for live musicians.
His advice to students is to recognize that software engineering is a team sport.
“A good software programmer is somebody who can write some code to get the desired output quickly with few bugs,” he says. “But a good software engineer is someone who does that plus writes code that others can easily understand and maintain.”
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