Something's Different

Many years ago, I went to Chicago with my partner. I can honestly say that up until that point, I’d never seen a city so big. We stayed on the 5th floor – this might have been the first time I’d been on the 5th floor of anything, come to think of it. Looking out the window felt like looking into a diorama – the nooks and crannies, the shady figures, the police cars and their little lights… I felt like I was an outside observer, watching the city from above as all of its stories unfolded. Every gated brick storefront felt like a place where someone was trying to do something they cared about, trying to make something happen.

The next day, we went to see Blue Man Group at the Briar Street Theatre - a place that embodied the grit that I’d perceived from my perch in the Hilton. Corrugated plastic tubes formed a mass on the ceiling, criss-crossing from beaker to beaker containing various fluorescent solutions; tubes occasionally exited the wall at a right angle, and the surrounding crowd quickly determined that putting your ear up to one of the tubes would yield a wide variety of sounds, ranging from speeches to music to what I can only assume was the recorded gossip of a pod of humpback whales.

In 2014, I stayed at the Mariah in Mojave, the night before my interview with Scaled Composites. I had flown in to LAX and taken a rental car up to Mojave. On the drive up, I noticed that the music was different. I found some laid-back rap on the radio as I drove through Palmdale; I opened the window to warm, dry air. As I continued north, it was very dark, with the blinking red lights of the wind farm creating a point cloud that described the Tehachapi mountains in perfect detail. When I got out of the car at the hotel, I noticed that parking spaces were suggestions – in the flat dirt of the desert, you can park almost anywhere, and people did.

When I got to my first-floor room, I looked out the window at the spaceport – there were huge buildings in the distance and the few outside clues as to what was inside them were exciting. Here, too, I got the sense that around every corner lurked a project or a person or an idea. This was a new place and anything was possible.

Ever since the first time I stayed in a hotel, the first thing I’ve always done when I get to the room is walk to the window and see what’s outside. It’s rarely been any particularly grand vista, but it’s been a window into a world of possibility and excitement. I’ve usually gotten there at night, and I don’t know what’s out there yet. There could be friends and enemies, monsters even. There could be wonders beyond my wildest dreams. Who knows?

This changed in the last few years. When I get to a room, I close the blinds, turn on the TV, and usually fall asleep within the hour. I’m tired and jaded. I could swear the rooms used to be nicer; now it seems like everything is broken. The hinges on the cupboards are loose… the tile in the bathroom is cracked… I always have to hold the TV remote really high so that it actually sees the TV.

So many things have changed for me. The aerospace industry doesn’t have the same allure that it once did. When I walk by a cracked hangar door blocked by a black curtain, I don’t wonder what’s inside anymore. When a program I’m involved in gets close to flight test, I’m not clamoring to be on the test team. When I get up at 3am for a briefing at 4am, I haven’t been sitting awake in bed for the last 30 minutes, excitedly waiting for my alarm to go off.

As I stare out the window of a fifth-floor room at the Holiday Inn Express in Palmdale, I can feel flickers of that sense of adventure. I’m looking out at Plant 42, with Lockheed’s massive buildings sprawled across a dark expanse carved out within the city lights. I’ve stayed at the Holiday Inn in Lancaster a ton. This one’s new. I don’t know what restaurants are nearby. I don’t know what projects are hidden in all these buildings or who’s working tirelessly inside to bring them to life. And I feel the slightest tickle of that sense of adventure, and it’s great. I feel like I can do something in this life, and I feel the excitement of not knowing what that’s going to be.

I think about the first time I fell in love. The love that I know now is so much more and so much less at the same time. I think my professional ambitions might be evolving in the same way. I’ve struggled with the emptiness of realizing that the topical world of sleepless nights and fast-burn engineering challenges isn’t enough for me. As that emptiness fades, it’s replaced by a growing excitement for what I can do with my newfound patience for the day-to-day problem solving that’s needed to be more than just a follower, more than just an enabler of the latest billionaire’s wet dream. It feels like a superpower that I can use to finally power through the drudgery of taking my own ideas as far they can really go.

I have to confess that I’ve never actually read Seth Godin’s The Dip, but I feel like my career up to this point has mostly jumped from project to project as they exit their own dips. I look at the years of effort that have gone into some of the programs that I’ve joined as a finish-line firefighter, and I have a newfound respect for the work that got them there. While I think in many cases engineers who follow programs for years do so out of a desire for security, I think that the commitment and even keel required to stick with something worth doing for that long is not entirely dissimilar from the forces that keep long-term couples together, and I really do think there’s something beautiful about that.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve stuck with me through a rambling exploration of what it’s like for me to realize that my professional life is never going to be the same; reading it back to myself, it’s admittedly fallen disconcertingly close to my romantic life, but I’m going take a hard left turn away from drawing any conclusions about that. For now, I’m looking forward to tackling bigger, deeper problems that matter. I’m looking forward to the hard parts. I’m looking forward to summoning the energy to take a project through the doldrums to reach its full potential, and I’m looking forward to communicating that energy to those working alongside me. I’m excited to stay in more hotels.

How Will You Know?

“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in our space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again.” - President John F. Kennedy

As an aerospace engineer, I’ve spent a lot of my life wondering what the next Apollo mission will be. Not literally, of course. I want to know what’s going to exert that kind of pull on our hearts and our imaginations. This is a regular topic of conversation for me that, by and large, my friends are fairly exhausted with. There’s an entire segment of the skydiving community that is so completely tired of this line of reasoning that it’s become a surefire way to chase everyone away from the campfire.

Of all of the incredible things we’ve accomplished, though, the Apollo missions are still in a class of their own. There’s something different, right? A different color? The project defines its own class of anticipation. It united not just our country, but the entire world towards a common goal. When we look back on it, either through the lens of our imaginations or through popular media, it conjures engineers in ties and short-sleeve button-ups, chain smoking and tirelessly working to solve the unsolvable. Dynamic decisions bound only by the facts as we knew them and the best path forward. Fearlessness.

We could just as easily look back on other massive undertakings, but the reality is that we don’t. Something about mass production, Henry Ford and the Model T, the Wright Brothers and their Flyer… even Leonardo da Vinci and all of his somewhat unhinged endeavors. They just don’t hit the same.

I believe that the real magic of the Apollo missions is that they were emblematic of real, tangible hope. Hope for a future that so many of us dream of. Not just a future where we’ve landed on the moon – a future where we’ve created a world we want to live in. A Jetsons future, with flying cars and robot butlers. A prosperous future, where we’ve solved the problem of putting food on the table and can set our sights on loftier goals, high up the rungs of Maslow’s pyramid.

In Bret Victor’s talk, “Inventing on Principle”, he advocates for a third option in life. Alongside the diligent Craftsman and the fearless Problem Solver, you can choose to identify with a principle. You can choose a vision for the world you want, and work tirelessly in whatever capacity is needed to bring the world to that vision. I’ve never quite heard it put so succinctly, but that’s what I want to do. This isn’t to say I know exactly what I want from the future. I’m still finding my principle, to use Bret’s words. I’ve come to believe that the process of finding your principle is the answer to a far more important question. So instead of exhausting the world with questions about the next Apollo program, I’ve start asking something different: How will you know that the future we’ve created is the one you’ve been dreaming of?

I’m not sure I have a good answer to this myself. I’ve gotten a few glimpses of what this means to me. Here’s one of those glimpses: I believe that there is intrinsic value in doing more with less, and I believe that’s something worth chasing with the same fervor as acquiring more.

As a programmer, Moore’s law is the bane of my existence. Whenever we approach the boundaries of our current computing capacity, those boundaries get pushed out further, meaning there’s fundamentally no incentive to push for more efficient software. There are still benefits hiding in there, though, and we aren’t taking advantage of them.

There’s the obvious impact on energy consumption. Fewer cycles will always be fewer electrons. Smaller, more efficient codesets simply take less energy to run. In 2019, computing technology accounted for approx. 8.5% of global energy consumption, a number that’s growing annually. By the nature of computing devices, they often operate most efficiently when loaded at 60-80%. By continually choosing hardware that provides nearly limitless computing power compared to the problem at hand, we’re wasting energy.

This goes deeper, though. Software reliability is a complex topic. Traceability to requirements is a fundamental tenet of safety critical software development; so is test coverage. In my experience, these topics often become extremely muddled in safety critical software development projects, with the application of DO-178 being seen as “best effort”, often carried out by someone with little practical knowledge of the codebase and shirked by the programmers themselves. This is deeply concerning. Bloated, overcomplicated codebases exacerbate this problem dramatically.

Finally, there’s the concept of design constraints. I believe that design constraints, used in moderation and bent when appropriate, lead to better design. This is why I don’t own a 5-axis mill. Similarly, it’s why I typically spec just enough processor to get the job done. Most of my embedded projects have used a hybrid 8/16-bit processor clocked at 16MHz, and that’s been plenty. We have to think about time and space – not agonize over it, but think about it. As a result, we get small, simple, reliable codebases that elegantly address the problem at hand. I’ll add that interrupt programming is, in my opinion, one of the more deeply satisfying things life has to offer.

A hardware corollary to this lies in PCB design. I follow a few self-imposed constraints – no passives smaller than an 0805, no traces under 10 mils, no spacing under 6 mils, no more than two layers, and if it goes outside the board it gets ESD protection. I pick a board footprint at the get-go and I don’t change it until I’m out of options. This usually puts the slightest amount of discomfort on my layouts – I have to think about where components go, and I always have to analyze the ground planes to ensure there’s sufficient return area. The rewards are immense, however. I can rework my boards by hand, they’re bulletproof, and they all work at 40,000 ft. without me having to think about it. I can assemble them with a pick-and-place machine from 1992 and I can debug them with handheld scope probes. And when I look at boards I’ve designed, I’m proud of them (the good ones, at least – we all have a few misses). I can’t tell you the number of boards I’ve seen from major aerospace companies that consist of a bunch of 0402s scattered like grains of salt on top of four pasture-like layers. There’s no art there.

Throughout 2024, we saw major advancements in nuclear fusion and AI. While I’m excited about these things, they aren’t my Apollo. They don’t, on their own, paint a picture of a future that I’m fighting for. I want to see a future where we don’t just thoughtlessly expand to meet the bounds of the box that we’re in. I want to see all of us appreciate and value the art in what we do.

I haven’t quite figured out what that looks like yet, but I have some ideas. Agricultural innovations, such as hydroponic farming and drip irrigation systems, really speak to me. I’m also really interested in anything that stops us from throwing out our phones and computers every two years. And I’m coming to realize that establishing these principles for myself and learning to work for them is an important piece of me.

When we’re living in a future that you’ve hoped and dreamed about, how will you know?

On Risk and Reverence

I’m an irreverent person. I’m a college dropout and a company founder. I’ve built my career on coloring outside the lines, and I’ve pissed a lot of people off that way. So many of the people I’ve looked up to over the years have operated similarly – galloping roughshod through territory that is held sacred by many. Burt Rutan was, of course, an early figure of inspiration for me. So was Steve Jobs. It’s hard to admit, but seeing the world as it is today, I think I was wrong about some pieces of this.

I’ve done a lot of things that most reasonable folks would consider to be dangerous. I’ve spent many years commuting on motorcycles, to include one winter in Michigan. I taught myself aerobatics in a wooden airplane I bought for $7,000. I’ve singlehanded a 36’ sailboat in the open ocean. As of today, I have a little over 200 skydives and 11 BASE jumps.

I’ve also worked with teams doing dangerous things. Professionally, I led a test team that brought a company into explosive test operations, acting as test conductor for the first explosives tests in the company. I’ve worked a mission control console on 5 different test programs including three first flights.

I’ve also seen things go wrong. I’ve managed a stand down and disassembly after a hang fire. I’ve put out fires and cut live battery cables. As a pilot, I’ve had flight control jams and engine failures. As a skydiver I’ve taken a terminal reserve ride. Tragically, I’ve seen two fatal accidents during test programs.

After all of this, I’m still going to do dangerous things and take risks; it’s an important part of who I am. The piece that I really care about is that everyone involved understands the risk they’re taking, and I firmly believe that the responsibility for this lies with everyone. The skydiving community loves to revel in the choose-your-own-adventure nature of the sport – you’re responsible for your own destiny, and the risk you take is yours. I love this too. What I don’t like, however, is when new skydivers are encouraged to join jumps that are far beyond their capabilities, and no one discusses the risks with them. It’s an unreasonable expectation for a new jumper to know the subtleties of freefly-friendly gear, or why it’s so important to coordinate multiple tracking groups on one jump.

When I see this happen, it hurts. I feel like all of the pain I’ve experienced, both emotional and physical, was for nothing. I feel like my colleagues who aren’t here anymore didn’t matter. I feel like I’ve failed. I feel all of this because risk acceptance is something I hold sacred.

These feelings changed how I look at reverence. I’m still irreverent, and I still push hard to find the boundaries of what I’m capable of and push them out further. I will always be trying to do the impossible. What’s new, though, is an understanding that this can cause real hurt for reasons that I might not be able to see. I’m trying to handle these things with less brashness and more softness, and when someone is pushing back on what I’m doing, I’m striving to handle it with empathy instead of blasphemy. I might not always get it right, but I’m trying.

It’s a difficult balance for an innovator. It requires a lot of faith – sometimes blind – that you’re doing the right thing, and there will always be people trying to talk you out of it. Creative energy can be really hard to come by, and when you have it, you need to protect it fiercely. Creative energy is another thing I hold sacred.

I’m not advocating against innovation, or for walking on eggshells – I’m advocating for innovation with empathy. I’m advocating for understanding that when you overturn closely held ideologies, you’re going to be talking to people who are in pain, and as innovators we have a responsibility to understand that, approach it with respect, and consciously decide if it’s worth it. My experience has been that these ideologies can just as easily exist in technical spaces just as much as they can exist in moral and religious spaces.

Right now, I’m thinking about something that generations before us held sacred. Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, and many more were worried about how technology can erode our humanity - or the figurative humanity of another world - in ways that we might not see until it’s too late. Today, we’ve seen their detached vignettes bloom into our world in ways that I see every day. As a sci-fi nerd, I love it. When I hear a sonic boom from a Space-X launch, I think of Rocket Summer. When I get into an electric car, I think of Minority Report. It brings a lot of color and inspiration to my world, and I’m thankful for that.

I’m not sure, though, that we’re doing it right. Only small slices of our industries are fully leveraging the power of data analytics as it existed even in the early 2000s. I only recently started leveraging the power of simple database tools like PostgreSQL in my own work, and I’ve been blown away by what I’ve been able to accomplish. Looking across all of the industries I’ve worked in, it’s clear to me that we haven’t mastered the ability to really use all of the data that’s available to us at the individual level.

I always run before I can walk, but now, I believe all of us have a responsibility to consider the sanctity of the ground we’re running on. Today, we’re seeing rapid integration of AI tools into military kill chains. Maybe we should all think about that.

I'm a little worried, guys.

I’ve always been a communicator. When I was 12, I started writing articles and sending them to the editor of my local model airplane club’s newsletter. He unceremoniously gave me a column, “The Trailing Edge.” This briefly got picked up by the Fly Times, an aviation newsletter which increased my readership to the statewide level, and I enjoyed an unusual amount of notoriety for a teenager.

I’ve usually maintained a blog of some type or another, sometimes personal and sometimes on behalf of my company. I was featured on the Discovery Channel, NPR, and a host of local news outlets as an alternative energy activist when I was 16. I’m in a couple of books. When my life moved into the world of aerospace, I kept communicating, posting my shenanigans on Facebook for anyone who would watch.

And then the world started to get scary. Facebook got loud, political, and divisive. My career became increasingly secretive, as did my personal life. Suddenly, communication became risk. In November of 2019, I logged off of Facebook and never looked back. I stopped talking openly about my projects. I even moved to a quiet, remote house on a mountain top, where I weathered the pandemic in peace and solitude. For the first 6 months that I lived there, I didn’t have internet or cell service. I’d catch up on things when I drove down the hill for work or groceries. Bob, the neighborhood bobcat, became the only first-name-basis friend I would see regularly.

In many ways, this was wonderful. I loved the mountains, the snow, the wildlife. I loved my morning coffee and my evening whiskey in the backyard, looking out into the woods. My brain started to get quieter and more deliberate. I made peace with some difficult times in my past.

At the same time, however, my world got smaller. Friends who used to ask me how my projects were going would now ask what happened to me. The town in the valley below evolved, as old friends moved away and new people moved in who I only knew in passing, if at all. This didn’t bother me that much – I was living my own little Walden. My attention had turned inward, as did my sense of validation. I was finally happy. Not without struggle, but happy.

I don’t live on a mountaintop anymore. My brain got what it needed and I came back down. After a bit of shuffling around, I moved to Ventura. I’ve been getting out more, spending more time around people in general and making new friends. It’s been wonderful. I’m a little worried, though.

The world keeps getting scarier. Geopolitical tensions are certainly the highest they’ve been in my lifetime, along with divisiveness within our country. AI is real. Brain implants are real. We’re going to space on a weekly basis. The sense of societal responsibility associated with these things has started to feel a little heavy. There’s a lot going on right now, and a lot of us are concerned. There’s one piece in particular I’d like to talk about.

As we go into this year, we are faced with a national ban on TikTok. After years in the aerospace industry, I’m no stranger to the security concerns an app like this poses. My company has adhered to FAR 52.204-27 since we began pursuing federal contracts in early 2023. I watched social media companies like Facebook and Twitter begin removing misinformation. I’ve been watching increasing media bias and inflammatory – even unprofessional – language become commonplace in once-trusted venues.

There’s no understating how complicated these topics are, and I won’t pretend to have the answers. One conclusion that I have drawn is that communication has never been more important. We must not lose our ability to speak, and as a society we all hold that responsibility together.

The first hard lesson I learned, as a teenager giving interviews to nationally syndicated media outlets, was that it’s entirely possible to say correct and important words yet communicate absolutely nothing. The ability to make noise is only one small piece of the skill of communication.

I quickly learned that empathy is essential. You have to know who you’re talking to, and see the world the way they do, in order to get the words inside. I learned the art of debate. I learned how readily a skilled opponent can rattle your bones. Much later in life, I learned how to see past these efforts, a skill that I’m still perfecting.

Perhaps most importantly, communicating used to bring me joy and connection. I’d work on some goofy project and write a blog post about it or put a video on Facebook, and people would ask me about it when I’d bump into them. I’d realize they were interested in some of the same things and we’d talk about it. I was always excited to talk to people. I really miss that.

While we’re currently faced with the loss of our ability to make noise in one small way, it has never been more important to make the best use of the rest of our outlets. So this year, I have two resolutions:

1) Communicate. This blog post is the first step. I know it’s important that I start talking again. Not just because it brings me joy, but because more than ever, the world needs all of us to practice the skill of sharing our voices. We can’t afford to lose it.

2) Do things. We live in a world where someone has already been there, done that, done it better, and put it on the internet. I don’t care anymore. Doing stuff makes me happy. I love machining. I love writing software. I love designing circuit boards. I love putting all of these things together to make something new, even if it sucks. I’m going to start doing that again.

I’d like to encourage anyone reading this to join me. We need to be heard. We need to do things, make things, break things. It’s what makes us, us.

Even if it sucks.