About Me
My Journey
(More Than Just an Engineer)
Prologue (when the dinosaurs roamed...) -
At a very early age, somehow I knew I was going to be an engineer. I didn't know what to call it when I was small, I only knew that I wanted to know how everything worked. So, and to my parents consternation, I took apart everything I could find. As I became a young man, I learned how to put things back together (occasionally fixing them in the process). All the while trying to figure out how to make all these cool teenage things in my head into reality. I guess it was inevitable that I found my self in a Mechanical Engineering program in college, where I finally learned the skills to turn my thoughts and dreams into real things.
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More Recent Events
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Education -
I graduated from Virginia Tech with a BS in Mechanical Engineering and a strong aptitude in both Aerospace and Electrical Engineering. Several of my hobbies have included something to do with Aircraft and I have always been an enthusiast. On of my most involved past projects (found in the section of the same name below) has to do with aircraft. And I have long designed my own circuit boards and microcontroller involved projects. Lately it's been programming in C using Arduino MCs of some sort. Lots of Open Source code liberally "borrowed" for use in my things.
During a long and winding career, I have had many opportunities come to my door, and in most cases just at the time I was at a crossroads in life. I don't know if it's fate or just plain good luck, but when I look at what I've been afforded the ability to do and the teams I've been able work with, I'm amazed at where life has taken me.
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Learning to be a Design Engineer in a Manufacturing Environment -
After graduating and staying in Blacksburg briefly, I found myself in Charlottesville, VA working for one of the last electronics manufacturing firms still in the US. I was a Mechanical Design Engineer with the assembly lines literally 100 feet away from my cubicle (cube farms were all the rage back then).
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The concepts of DFM and DFA were in their infancy then, consumer electronics was still a young industry compared to today. But I and the others in the Engineering department were early practitioners and avid adopters. We literally had to design around the teams of people who were going to be doing the assembly and test (some of the absolutely nicest people I could ever have hoped to work with). It was not uncommon for me to go out to the lines and discuss assembly ideas with the workers and supervisors who would be responsible for mass production of the product.
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It was also not uncommon for me to be paged to the assembly line when there was a problem. Many a day found me hastily working on a work-around solution due to problems with anything from tooling to supply chain issues. Keeping the line uptime was very important to the company bottom line.​​
On to learning the ropes as an Enterpreneur -
During the dot com boom of the nineties, I was busy honing my skills in the manufacturing environment described above. At the time, I didn't write much code so being in Silicon Valley probably wouldn't have done much for my career anyway. But keeping current on the engineering front I was keenly aware of what was happening and to be honest, I was more than a little jealous.
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But, as fate would have it, the opportunity to work overseas presented itself and when I made that leap, everything changed.
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I was working as a consulting engineer overseeing operations in the UK for a business entity based in the states. Once I wrapped my mind around the new way that the professional relationship was going to work, I realized that this was going to be the new way of the world. The thought that I would live in the same professional mold as my parents was gone.
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I came home from working overseas in September of 2003, and after a short stint with a company which no longer exists in the US (long and boring story) I was picked up with a startup company launching a medical device. In some ways my dream job as 1) I was moving into Engineering Management (the UK experience was Ops management), 2) it was a medical device, and 3) it was a startup.
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Since that time, I have intermittantly worked for startups and larger companies, each with their unique challenges. My sweet spot in the startup world is getting in on the ground floor, being able to contrubute to the culture and strategic goals of a company. In the 20+ years since I launched into the startup world I have honed not only my Engineering acumen, but my business acumen as well. Engineering and product development tuned to the needs of the business. Data based decisions. Fast failures. All this is a mental stance that needs to be adopted to be successful in the startup world.
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Lastly, when I look back at those times in the nineties when I was regretting not being in Silicon Valley, I now know that the time training in a manufacturing environment was time well spent. As a starting engineer, I learned skills that are largely lost in the landscape of engineering in the US today. From the eighties on, as history has shown, businesses in this country were off-loading manufacturing and the requisite skills to support it. For over 30 years, the depth of understanding from things like SPC and QC (just to name a few) have been running shallower and shallower in this country because the need hasn't been here. Having been a Design Engineer in a manufacturing firm, and having managed CMs is very much not the same thing.
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Wrap it all together, and you get the picture that after a career so long and varied, I'm quite comfortable in a wide variety of operating environments, and capable of providing the framework for Engineering and Operations where an environment does not yet exist
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It all leads up to the present day -
​Through it all, technology advancements have given me the ability to very easily turn my ideas into real-world creations. With powerful design tools, desktop CNC capability and multiple 3D printers at my disposal, I've reached a point in my life where I can think of something I want or need, and create it if it doesn't exist in the real world.
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I don't really consider myself eccentric, but some of the things I have made for myself would never be made for the mass market, too costly or not enough margin in the final product. This is what I do for a living, so I understand the difference between a good idea and one that should go through the enterprenueral process to be launched as a product
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Please look over the rest of my site and let me know what you think. Various projects are posted in different locations, depending on whether I consider it past, present, personal or professional.
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Enjoy!
While working at one large company in my past, I underwent a DiSC assessment as did everyone in management. Highly revealing all the way around, and I highly recommend it for any size organization.
Yes, I raced amateur Formula Ford for a couple of seasons