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For the last few years, I’ve been working on an open-source Ethernet switch.
That’s interesting as fuck, thanks for the good read.
I live in a state where we have fire season year round. I’m currently working on fire hardening the electrical lines in high fire risk areas.
how do you do that?
Nothing at all man. So many meeting, so depressing. Can’t wait to retire
Sometimes I have meetings about scheduling more meetings
NDA :(
New ways of cooling data servers and batteries for EVs. Rather than typical air or water/glycol cooling we’re immersing the components in a dielectric fluid. It’s an interesting space as both the hardware and fluids are being developed simultaneously. The company I work for is developing the fluid.
About 90% of the fluids out there are just oils taken directly from a refinery and repackaged under different names with a ton of marketing. Yet, end consumers don’t really understand the technical details of the the fluids so they tend to fall for whoever has nice marketing. We’re out to change that and show that the chemistry we add improves the performance and durability of the fluid. So half the job is engineering and the other half is educating customers.
Working on a camera system to automatically detect and notify operations of arc breakdowns in switchgear. Our facilities are big enough that when something goes bang, a lot of times we don’t know where it happened.
I do the hardware and software… Not the career I went to school for, but I’m having fun and it’s interesting.
Out of curiosity, why not go off-the-shelf? I think you can buy ready made systems for that job.
Couple of reasons: this is a high energy pulsed-power environment, so aside from concerns on how to reliably power it (I’m designing PoE into this new version), we also need it to be reasonably small and really fast.
Are we saving money? Individual units are certainly cheaper than COTS solutions. Maybe no real savings, but it’s meeting our needs without any compromises.
Besides, this is one of my simpler projects off the top of my head that wouldn’t bust an NDA. 😆
I agree with the NDA comment, it’s difficult to give a lot of the cool details without breaking NDA.
I feel pretty safe in saying that I’m working to come up with new ways to melt glass for our process in order to be more flexible about what compositions we’re able to use. That’s a pretty fun one for me.
Working on a full stack app hosted in Azure for the last year or so, which has come with a lot of learning. Working on the legacy system next… wish me luck!
This engineer hasn’t worked on anything cool lately.
Hoping to find a new job later this year and move onto something more interesting as a byproduct of that. Assuming that doesn’t lead to me being drowned in meetings and emails…
They don’t pay us to work on cool things.
I’m marginally improving factory layouts bit by bit. Probably for the next 50 years
I’m sure there are people who genuinely find that kind of work to be really cool, but I’m with you. It wasn’t enough for me.
I just could not get motivated over my projects being “Maybe we should store the pallets right here in packaging instead of 100ft away on the other side of the building” or “Let’s replace the screwdrivers in assembly with drills to increase productivity”. Who the fuck needs an engineering degree to tell them that drills are way faster than screwdrivers?
Let alone the bullshittery around monitoring every minute of each employee’s day and trying to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of it. One manager gave an entire presentation about how if every operator is 1 minute late coming back to their station from break it adds up to like 2 full weeks for 1 employee by the end of the year.
Like…I saw that manager gossiping with HR for anywhere from like 15-45 minutes every day. But here we’re trying to harass our employees for taking ONE EXTRA MINUTE of their 30 minute lunch break.
I just couldn’t. Continuous Improvement can be cool but not when it’s that kind of stuff, not to me anyway.
Just wanted to say that if you feel similarly and it’s making you miserable there are cool engineering jobs out there. Even Continuous Improvement can be really fun if the manufacturing process is complex and requires actual engineering to improve.
Yeah I like a lot of what I do and it honestly gives me a lot of opportunities to express my class consciousness and stand up for reasonable expectations of workers. But yeah I do really miss research and want to be doing cooler stuff. I’m just still a junior engineer and can’t afford grad school yet.
I’m also absolutely looking for other work it just seems nobody is interested in junior engineers except the military.
Im also in this boat and it breaks my heart seeing this shit.
Working to make sure the electric grid doesn’t blow up when we add a few more generators.
I worked in a lightweieght LMS that I will improve soon https://github.com/navitux/workshops_project/
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hits bong
I’m working on open source session replay tool (skipping the name not to promote it explicitly, but its quite easy to guess since our niche has not too many fully OS companies) as R&D/js library maintainer; at the same time I’m making my own lemmy app :)
Very fun and quite the opposite experience (going in deep with browser specs and API vs thinking about mobile UI and features)
None of it looks cool anymore when you look at a computer screen long enough.
