Writings

If you spend any time on the internet, then you will inevitably run into the people who spend far too much time contemplating how they organize information and tasks. An entire industry has formed around something we seemingly did better at before personal computers. Digital tools can improve our productivity and it’s not by using any of the latest developments. People often surmise that my personal productivity system must be complex and rely on nerdy tools....

Everyone is out there selling themselves as the leader who can single-handedly defeat all problems. They’re pushing their personal brand, flooding LinkedIn with boastful content. This content that overwhelms our feeds crowding out meaningful updates from friends and rendering the services useless. People celebrate each other for being busy, for claimed successes, and for repeating inspirational quotes from people they’ve never met—quotes those people often never said. More than annoying us all, this self-aggrandizing is creating a general attitude that is pernicious and harmful to how we work....

Over my two decades of experience in robotics and engineering, I’ve found LiDARs to be integral part of how I’ve used robotic systems. I’ve used LiDARs for applications ranging from localization and mapping to obstacle avoidance, safety systems, and ground truth tracking. Most of the LiDARs I’ve used have been industrial grade devices, and today I have a hobbyist grade LiDAR that I need to get running before I put it on a home project....

Common Work Challenges As we read the return to office strategies communicated by various companies, it becomes evident that the challenges they’ve oft-cited – collaboration, team building, innovation, employee engagement, trust, accountability, and management preference – are not exclusive to remote work. They exist, to varying degrees, in all work environments, including office-first settings. Every single engineer who was working before COVID had heard these same drum beats before they were ever asked to work from home....

The following is an article I wrote for another platform and re-used internally at two different companies with some modifications. All too often I find front-line managers thrust team members into the interview room without the proper preparations. And why would highly technical people with no experience understand how to conduct an interview and what makes for an effective interview process? These interview best practices aren’t a substitute for coaching but will serve as an introduction for those individual contributors and a reminder for those of us who could use the refresher....

In our post on decision-making methods, we delved into the dynamics of decision-making in organizations, drawing attention to the different methods and their impact on your team’s success and culture. We put a spotlight on consent-based decision-making and explored its potential in fostering a culture of openness, respect, and innovation. Yet, a crucial part of the decision-making process remains unexplored: how do we evaluate the quality of these decisions? In the world of engineering, the stakes are often high....

All too often I’ve seen teams making incredibly important decisions with no thought into how they come to the decision. In this article, we’ll focus on decisions with a broad impact that should be carefully considered. These are the decisions that shape the course of your organization, that affect multiple teams or departments, or that involve significant resources or risks. We’ll compare different decision-making methods and introduce an innovative approach that could revolutionize your organization’s decision-making: consent-based decision-making....