The Blueprint for Engineering Success: Part 2

“I think in a similar vein, when you feel like the cards are stacked against you in terms of time to develop something, but you really want to get the greatest thing out and developed, I'd say balancing that act of balancing the scheduled deliverables, but also the pushing the new state of the art technologies they want to get out the door really helps drive what we do here as a business and what I do in my own life. So, solving the complex challenges and understanding how we fit what was effectively, I guess the size of a piece of paper, in terms of a schematic or like a design, or like, a hardware solution down into that of a business card I would say is really one of my proudest moments from an engineering standpoint. And it was a really hard problem to solve too, but ultimately did it, and that was great.”

“The first piece of advice that I got as an engineer when I first started working was: to always understand the problem, rather than jumping into the solution. The idea behind that is that, while we love solving complex problems, we always want to say ‘All right, let's just start trying things now.’ It always helps to take a step back and understand what the problems are, so you can take a methodical approach to solving those problems. If you already start down a path that you find might not be the right path you might get off into the right or otherwise turn left when you were supposed to turn right for that example, right?

So if we kind of take a step back and understand the problem at a higher level, you can start choosing which path to take first and then when you know that you're going down that wrong path, you can always backtrack and move a different way. In the same vein, I'd say, when you’re down that path and you realize that that was the wrong path, always ensure that you're learning from that mistake and moving in a different direction. So that's to say, failure is an option. Learn from your failure and always move forward from that.”

“If you are able to remain optimistic and realistic in your approach that definitely helps out in terms of being able to continue that progress and understand you know, at the end of the day, we're still marching towards the same goal over the same conclusion, so even if you veer off left or off right you can always course correct and get back in the path that you want to take anyway. And then don't let it discourage you when you do fail because you know, it's always a learning moment. There's always an opportunity to do something different. No one is going to say you did terribly, because at the end of the day we’re all one happy team that’s really trying to bring everyone together to do something as a group, rather than an individual.”

"The coolest thing I designed, actually was —so it was cool to me because I was a kid and not necessarily an adult, but I was able to design like a miniature robot car that was able to use motion sensors, proximity sensors and infrared light sensors, had motors for­—it was a wheel—so had motors and whatnot, but it was a small robot car and I was able to program it so that it would follow lines as well as if it got too close to wall it would backtrack and go in a different direction. And it was cool to me because I think that's what kind of jump-started — my interest in solving complex problems. But also being a kid, it was like, oh, this is pretty cool. I think it's still in my parent's house in my room but yeah that fun. That was a good time. That was cool to me.”