Departamento de Procrastinación

Memory Dump 20120414

The content on this tumblelog has been a trickle since last year. I’ve been busy with my work at 3D Robotics, pushing out products and getting a few promotions along the way. It pays off to be employee #7 at an open-source electronics company, which is now big enough that I forget people’s names. The 18 months I have worked there have been incredible; I’ve met a lot of great people and learned to not get intimidated when I’m assigned to work with Ph.Ds and people whose biographies are on Wikipedia.

I’ve traveled to more places because of this job than I have in my entire life, the highlight being a week spent in Shenzhen, China, hunting potential suppliers and manufacturers. Whoever tells you that you only need to know english to make your way around the world is a liar.

I’ve wanted to start a more technical blog to share some things I’ve learned from being part of the open-source hardware community, i.e. what goes on behind the scenes of a Kickstarter project pitching a hardware product, or what it’s like to launch a product competing directly with something from Digi International and having no clue about what you’re doing, or the things you learn about letting customers pre-order your product and then having trouble fulfilling the orders. It’s not all fun and Instagram photos of the office cat.

I also want to document some of my processes. As my Twitter bio states, I do “engineering” and “product photography”. I’m not particularly good at either of those things but learning is part of the job. I joined the company just months after getting my B.S. in electrical engineering, and EE is a massive field. I seem to have a knack for printed circuit design, which is part physics, part mechanical / industrial engineering, and part aesthetics. I had designed exactly one printed circuit while in school. So yes, I’m pretty new at this, but the fact that my designs are shipped around the world, used in quadcopters and small, cheap drones, and that they generate profits for the company, gives me some confidence.

I’ve acquired skel.ly which I might use for the blog mentioned above (probably running Octopress or another static blog generator), or something else. That domain was not cheap so that sort of motivates me to do something with it. I’m also sitting on merkuriana.com which just may end up becoming a music tumblr. As for this tumblr, it will likely stay the same but with a bit more of my bad photography. Owning and not using an expensive camera and a Lightroom license is making me feel guilty.

Also planning on selling rapidcats.com to Facebook in the near future.