This is just a big list of some important dates to me
I’ve been playing around with micro-controllers for the past few weeks. I’m currently making some air quality sensors that can connect to homekit, and a soil moisture setup that hopefully can autowater some of my plants. There’s been a project in my mind for the past year involving modular controller charging docks, so these current projects are working towards that goal.
Apple - I worked on the Mac Product Design team. It was a system integration role where we’d work with other teams figuring out how to make modules fit within the computers. During my internship, I spent a year primarily working on the 2018 Macbook Air. By the end of my year, I was owning the display for a 13” Pro product. I still remember the faces from some of the cross-functional teams when I told them I had to transition ownership so I could go back to school. I’d been there for long enough that people assumed I was a regular full-timer, which I took as a compliment.
I went back to the same team as a full time role. My first project was helping to migrate the keyboards from scissor to butterfly mechanisms across several of the laptops. It felt like I was getting a minor in statistics with all the analysis required to quantify the key feel metrics. After keyboards, I worked on most of the electronics within the Studio Display. I had a great EE team that gave me patience and time when explaining why this or that was necessary whenever they’d make requests that impacted the mechanical or system level performance.
Snackpass - I had the urge to see if the grass was really greener with another job, and went to Snackpass as the second mechanical engineer on the team. The role ended up not being a traditional mechanical design role. Some of the product development loops I’d do were
Changing the production quantities from millions at apple to thousands at snackpass definetly had an adjustment period. I had to start building relationships with vendors from zero at snackpass. Sheet metal and 3d printer were my friends when prototyping, and my other friends were a few local resturant owners who were willing to tolerate buggy v1 concepts. I learned how quickly you can ship something from concept to production, and continuously improving the product with each reorder from manufacturers.