From the Bucket

This episode is a detour from the career story because I've spent a big part of this year buried in compressor data, and it's been some of the most interesting work I've done. Industrial data collection is a spectrum, from an operator with a clipboard all the way up to full historians logging every point. In this episode I talk through what each level actually lets you do, how the ques...

Two years in Dallas. Sixteen-hour days. Full autonomy to make decisions, fix problems, and drive a project forward. And the you come home. In this episode, I talk about the part of field engineering nobody really warns you about: the transition back to the shop. The pace whiplash. The committees for decisions you used to make in thirty seconds. And the moment I realized where the phrase "it w...

There's a reputation that follows controls engineers around. Arrogant. Difficult. Convinced they're the smartest person in the room. I'm not going to tell you that reputation is completely undeserved. In this episode I talk about how the field builds that arrogance almost by design, what it actually looked like when I was inside it and couldn't see it, and why the honest answer is...

Every big chapter ends somewhere. This is where Dallas ends for me with miles of overhead conveyor, a burned motor, and a welding hood I hadn't picked up since high school. What two years in one place actually made me.

Every machine that comes into a production line has its own PLC, its own logic, and its own idea of how the world should work. As the system integrator, that's your problem to solve. In this episode, we break down the reality of integrating third-party machines into a line control system. Why fillers are the hardest machines to work with, why Ethernet doesn't actually mean access, and what...

The filler panel caught fire. It wasn't dramatic,just enough to trip the alarm and send everyone outside to stand in 110 degree Dallas heat. That moment pretty much sums up this entire project. This episode is about bad equipment, impossible expectations, and what you learn when software can't save you.

An experimental filler pushing 210 cartons per minute created one unexpected challenge: merging three lanes of cartons into a single line without collisions. What looked like a simple control problem became a deep dive into conveyor physics, compounding error, and the limits of mathematical modeling. In this episode, I tell the story of experimental filling line, the weeks spent chasing a perfect...

Not every successful project looks good while it’s happening. In this episode, I tell the story of a large gantry-based X-ray inspection system that started in frustration and ended in success. The original design never really existed, the space was brutally constrained, and normal installation methods were off the table from day one. I talk through why we started from scratch, how a distributed m...

Early in my career, I was handed my first real production line and told not to worry, the company had built it before. What I wasn’t given was the code, the standards, or a real starting point. In this episode, I talk through what happens when “experience” exists only as stories, how abstraction becomes a survival mechanism, and how early habits can quietly turn into long term technical debt. From...

Early career travel and responsibility often arrive together in controls engineering. In this episode, I talk about what “paying your dues” actually looked like for me, living on site, owning multiple lines too early, and learning the job under constant pressure. This is a story about growth, pride, and the hidden costs of becoming reliable. Music from Pixabay Monument_Music

In this first episode of From the Bucket , I tell the story of my very first controls project. It was a barcode verification system that worked exactly the way it was designed. We deployed it, customers were happy, and nothing broke. Years later, after feature creep, expansion, and a lot of well-intentioned decisions, it became a system that only a few people could support. And one of those people...