Engineers Need Art

I saw the "TADA" post a week or so back (like "TODO" but you finished it—"Tada!") and I regretted not having done write ups for projects I did in 2025. So I'm doing that belatedly. (https://engineersneedart.com) Also playing with building analog computers so I can understand them (and will not wait until 2027 to post about what I learned/did).

For some reason, this project reminds me of this one: https://engineersneedart.com/systemsix/systemsix.html

I found the linked article about his interview even more fascinating! I heard once about a mechanical engineer who brought printed photos of his previous projects to the interview instead of a typed resume, to good results. Once you’ve had to interview someone, you realize many times the interviewer is as nervous as the interviewee, so breaking the ice is valuable. https://engineersneedart.com/blog/interview/interview.html

Tangent, but for all we whinge about flat UIs and pine for the bezelled good old days, that colour picker from the oldest good old days is really bloody flat! https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/almostfired/HSL_RGB_Pickers.png

I really like this design by John Calhoun (known to me originally for his game Glider, I think he posts on HN as well): https://www.engineersneedart.com/systemsix/systemsix.html A wire-free version running a Mac emulator would be pretty slick. Very usable with MacWrite or a HyperCard deck of recipes.

Tom Dowdy was such a kind soul. https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/dowdy/dowdy.html http://www.poubelle.com/butterpig/

I really enjoyed reading other posts from your blogs as well - https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/interview/interview.html I have bookmarked many tech blogs, but find it hard to get the time to read or catch up with them. There are so many interesting stories out there. I hope to collect as many cool stories throughout my life and career.

He's a hackernews member, too. You can be pretty sure if he posts something it will show up here, for instance some time ago https://www.engineersneedart.com/systemsix/systemsix.html

I was thinking about this when reading John Calhoun's post about Tom Dowdy, which has been doing the rounds recently (probably via Daring Fireball): https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/dowdy/dowdy.html This was the 2nd half of the 90's and Apple was at that point in its history when it was circlng the drain. It was another lesson that would be reinforced over and over in my three-decade career as a programmer: if you work very long in this field, know that everything will eventually change. It was the supposed "dark times" to be at Apple: whole teams would be suddenly let go (the rest of us that lingered still might go through the abandoned offices of once co-workers looking to pull RAM out of their hardware for our own development machines). Some engineers like Tom, could see the writing on the wall early enough and knew when to switch teams. Tom ended up moving to the QuickTime team where he was able to continue to use his graphics talents. Later he worked on the iTunes visualizer if I recall correctly. It's possible to join a company at a bad time and still have a good experience there. (I don't know if everyone is aware how bad things got for Apple back then. IIRC they tried to sell the company to Sony, but Sony turned them down. They only survived due to investment from arch-nemesis Microsoft.)

There is https://www.engineersneedart.com/rss.xml