EP#91: An Ampersand Made Me A Hero

• Kaylan Smith
  • Houston native, rice owl , UX designer, artist, die hard Astros fan, and MacroFaber since July 2016
  • One of the strange breeds that went from being an artist to software development
  • Attended a talk that Stephen Kraig gave about MacroFab at her school where she was learning to become a developer
• Mike Williams
  • Fascinated with computers since 7th grade, when he first got to use a TRS-80 model 1
  • Seen the software development industry advance from MSDOS to smart phones and cloud computing
  • Written and designed software for flying cameras, high speed trains, and lots of business apps
  • Joined MacroFab about 2 years ago and moved to Houston last year with his wife Loretta and his dog Kosmo
  • Heard about MacroFab from the episode of The Amp Hour where Chris Church and Parker Dillmann where guests
• Kaylan and Mike talk about the new PCB experience on the MacroFab platform they helped develop
  • Overall cleaner interface that provides more information to customers
    • Quick turnaround
    • Eagle 8 and zip file uploading
      • Supporting Eagle 8 - challenging because of their new subscription model and purchasing by autodesk
      • Only need to upload a board file and BOM will populate with it automatically
    • Actual color preview of board, part notes & moves
  • Updates to BOM Screen
    • Price break graph
• For inspiring devs what are some tips to getting a solid background for getting that first dev job?
  • Williams: Tech is always going to be changing. Need to have great problem solving skills, and research and find information. Don’t be a specialist. Good language to start with is Python or Javascript.
  • Kaylan: Be a good collaborator and communicator.
  • Stackoverflow article about different programming languages used today
• Who at Macrofab writes the worst Jira tickets?
• What do hardware/electronic people do that drive you nuts?
  • Eagle writing out gerbers, it fills in with rasterized lines and default is .01 mil per line that generate monster files. You have to know to go in and change it.
• Longest you have looked for a semi colon or any other kind of syntax error?
  • Williams spent three days to find a missing ampersand.

Tags: Developers Developers Developers!, electronics podcast, Kaylan Smith, MacroFab, macrofab engineering podcast, MEP, Mike Williams, Podcast