6 Ways to Finish Your Projects
I often work on many projects at once. Finishing a project gives me great pleasure- I like to look at it, talk about it, and feel the sense of accomplishment that is nearly analogous to a runner’s high. But getting there takes some practice at the skill of Finishing Stuff. Universally, it is recognized that the last 10% of the project is 90% of the work. I’d say that the first third of the project is 2% of the work. Can someone do the curve and put it in the comments? Why is it so tough to finish projects and so easy to start them? Starting is easy, involving large portions of researching, discussion and shopping. These tasks don’t actually involve producing any results but they feel as though something has been accomplished. Making something out of nothing, to design something or to build something where it wasn’t in existence before…
This class is a joke
Next week, I’ll be finalizing the syllabus for my fall classes. I am again teaching the university studies classes for the electrical engineers. My goal in teaching last year was to help my students develop good study skills and awareness about their learning preferences. I also attempted to teach them some STEM specific skills, like keeping a lab notebook and learning some basic programming, along with helping them try to understand what they were getting themselves into by pursuing a major in engineering. However, in the past two weeks, I’ve been inundated with requests from various people around campus. “Can I give a presentation on X?” where X may or may not be of interest to campus students, especially engineers. I have to admit that this is getting rather annoying as I have a mostly full curriculum. There are times here and there where maybe I have 15 minutes where…
Weekend Journal — Vendor Relationships
This weekend I had a buddy in town who I’ve known since childhood. It was great getting to hang out with him. But in one of the great ironies of the universe, it came to pass that my best friend is also what sometimes ends up being a perfect foe for an engineer: a purchasing agent. In reality, we work for different companies and work in drastically different industries. So while there could be tension, it usually only comes up as a function of our discussions about what engineers should do and how purchasing agents should act. But on today’s topic, our contention came to a head: My purchasing friend says that I should not maintain relationships with vendors (platonic, of course). I should not allow them to buy me lunch occasionally. I should not accept sample kits from them. I should not talk to them other than in official capacities for work. I’ve written…
What’s In My bag : Sophi Kravitz
I carry around three bags for my daily routine of going from my house to car to worksite to car. Bag 1 is a handbag. It is pretty and contains a tiny tape measure, wallet and smartphone. I carry it when I go out to lunch. I like to have the tape measure because I often see something that spurs an idea and like to get an idea of scale. Bag 2 is a gym bag. It contains both my gym clothes and another change of clothes in case I spill something on myself before a meeting. I have a funny habit left over from before cell phones which is to keep comfy shoes in the gym bag in case my car breaks down and I have to walk to a service station. Bag 3 is a backpack, of which the contents change frequently since I work for a few…
What’s In My Bag: Chris Gammell
We’re kicking off this week with a series of posts from our authors about what we carry around with us as engineers. We’re sure you’ll find lots of similarities and would love feedback on what you see and possibly even what you think we’re missing! I’ll start us off: Bag: Most of my work is done on a laptop these days. Therefore, I’m often found toting my entire laptop setup around with me. I wouldn’t think otherwise these days, but I know many EEs who prefer desktops because of the assumed high power processing (think MATLAB). Plus doing schematic entry and board layout often requires multiple screens. Still, I favor portability and being able to work from anywhere over a slightly faster load time of a web page or a calculation. Computer: This is a pretty standard issue Lenovo notebook from my workplace. Sure, it’s boring from the outside. But…
WTF #15: Interviewing Tip: Know Your Basics
I’ve been away from EngineerBlogs.org for a couple of weeks as I’ve been traveling. I finally made it out of China, and it was about time. I flew directly to a country that shall not be named, except to say she is the top exporter of crude oil to the United States. But I didn’t linger long in oil-country, just enough to take care of some personal business before heading off to my next stop, America the Beautiful and her Keystone State. For two straight nights, I had greasy burgers and fries for dinner and I must say, it felt pretty good. I’ve now returned to oil-country and will stay here a while before going back to China again. Despite my travels, one thing I continue to do is to interview candidates for our open analog IC design positions in China. I leave all the fancy questions, such as control theory,…
Weekend Journal — You Don’t Need Permission
Though I’m an engineer, I don’t necessarily consider myself a natural tinkerer. Sure, I started out that way, as most kids do. My childhood inspirations included Legos, Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets and lots of toys that are precursors to engineering. But as I got older, I didn’t step into many of the other stereotypical “future engineer” activities. I never learned how to change a car’s oil or do regular maintenance. I never framed a house or similar structures. I never built a computer from components at the store (though this is obviously more relevant around the time I grew up vs 20 years prior). I never got a ham license or had a 200 in 1 electronics kit, two things that almost guarantee a future as an electrical engineer. So what gives? My parents were both very supporting and continue to be to this day. And I regularly worked on…
Bottom of the Design Curve with No Budget
This week is a Theme Week and we’re writing about our experiences at some point in the product or company’s lifecycle. My Location : Startup. I’ve always seen design engineering as having two distinct categories. Sustaining engineering and R&D engineering. Since I’d always seen Sustaining as being boring (sorry Chris!), involving designing the same product over and over, tweaking it to make it better, but basically understanding how it works already, I managed to start in R&D nearly right out of college. Seb’s recent post seems to prove me wrong, but maybe “Sprockets” have it better than us “Sparkies”! Some of the companies I’ve worked at on a project basis were similar. They had been in existence for years, eking out a living and had a common trait: No money for New Product Development (NPD). I’ve had many successful projects (I came, I designed, it worked), but the unsuccessful ones are…
The Future of Education
The Overiew I recently signed up for 6.002: Circuits and Electronics, an introductory level course and the first course available from MITx, MIT’s free, online school. Unlike MIT’s Open Course Ware, which has an incomplete selection of videotaped classroom lectures (some courses are more complete than others) and assorted problem sets, the MITx course has been designed from the ground up to be completed online. Each “week” of class has two lecture sequences, a homework set, and a lab. The lecture sequences each take about an hour and a half to complete, and are broken up into 2-5 minute segments. Some segments feature virtual chalkboard sessions, others feature clips from actual classroom demonstrations. Occasionally, the professor will ask you to solve a simple problem in the middle of class to reinforce a point. The video segments then switch to an untimed online mini-quiz. The student answers in a text field and get…
An Interview with Ytai Ben-Tsvi, Inventor of the IOIO
Ytai Ben-Tsvi is the creative mind behind the IOIO (pronounced “yo-yo”). It is a hobby development board similar to the Arduino, but designed specifically to attach hobby peripherals to an Android phone through the USB port. I recently had a chance to interview him. What is the story behind the IOIO board and what has been your involvement thus far? In the summer of 2010 I was in California on a business trip (I was living in Israel then). A colleague of mine was telling me about the cellbots.com project that he was involved with. They were building little hobby robots based around Android phones. He was unhappy about the hacky ways they were using to connect the phone to motors and asked me whether I have an idea to fix this. After a couple of days, I thought I found a solution and that’s how IOIO was born. Another thing that makes it…