This category combines practical career advice, proven productivity systems, strategies for ongoing skill development, and thought-provoking industry commentary into a single resource for tech and engineering professionals. You’ll find guidance on navigating your career path, techniques for optimizing workflows and staying focused, methods for continuously learning new technologies, and critical analysis of broader trends shaping today’s workforce—all designed to help you grow, stay productive, and remain ahead of the curve.
Tracking and categorizing financial transactions can be tedious, especially when it comes to Amazon orders. With Amazon’s new data policies, it’s harder than ever to retrieve detailed purchase information in a usable format. Amazon is so broad that a credit card charge could be for a digital or physical product, a whole foods purchase. The […] read more
Article views are my own and not coordinated with my employer, Boeing, the National Academies, DARPA or the US Air Force. Aerospace and Defense work is super technical, rewarding and meaningful. But it’s more than that. Everyone in this industry deeply cares about protecting the people who fly and fight in these planes. You feel […] read more
Professionally, my goal was “work hard until something good happens” for many years. I had the luxury of the world’s best string of bosses. I had no idea how lucky I was to be learning from giants who poured wisdom into me, protected me and told me hard truths that shaped my character. At DARPA […] read more
I think about Winston Churchill a lot. A successful writer, correspondent, painter, politician and businessman, he is known for his bold principled stand against Hitler. However, zoom in and a more complex narrative emerges. After Neville Chamberlain negotiated the Munich Agreement in 1938, which sought to appease Nazi Germany by allowing them to take control […] read more
In Shawshank redemption Otis “Red” goes before the parole board with promises to be better. He tries to play by the rules and repeatedly gets denied. Finally, he has had enough and lets them have it. He is done with their game, they can keep him there forever. He speaks with the tired wisdom of […] read more
Embracing hard things is important. We lift up those among us who work harder, endure more and suffer to get stronger or make the world better. But how much suck should we embrace? When is ok to relax or is choosing to relax opening the door to cowardice and weakness? Yesterday when I was playing […] read more
I automate everything and PDFs are so easy to fill in automatically. It’s a digital world and we just live in it. It’s so frustrating to get a “protected form” that doesn’t allow for appending documents, automated form completion or even filling out fields. It’s silly because all of these forms are printable. Many years […] read more
I deleted and recovered a large number of photos (thanks foremost). However, a large number of images from a browser cache was messing up my photo library. Who wants to keep 10,000 of these images stored on my harddrive? I used the number of unique colors to filter them out via MATLAB. As expected, if […] read more
Happy New Year! Bring in the new year with some code to transform USAA bank statements into a set of transactions for 2016. It is a little tricky because there are some 2015 transactions in the list and USAA puts transactions on two lines. To use, just save the bank statement pdf as text and […] read more
I often struggle to find the right balance between automation and manual work. As it is tax time, and Chase bank only gives you 90 days of statements, I find myself every year going back through our statements to find any business expenses and do our overall financial review for the year. In the past […] read more