1y ago

Engineers, what cool things are you working on?

53 comments

NDA :(

Postdoc in engineering research - we’re using machine learning to predict chemical properties relevant to combustion, speeding up the discovery of cleaner liquid fuels as we transition away from fossil fuels!
- interesting. how does that process work?
  
  TL;DR, I throw a bunch of molecules at a pile of linear algebra, and hope predicted values line up with known experimental values; then I use the pile of linear algebra on novel molecules.
  There's a bit more to it than that, like how to represent molecules in a computer-readable format, generating additional input variables (molecular characteristics), input variable down-selection and/or dimensionality reduction, the specific ML models we use (feed-forward MLPs and graph convolution nets), and how to interpret results as they relate back to combustion.
  From a broad perspective, our work is just a small part of a larger push from the Department of Energy to find economically-viable alternative liquid fuels. ML speeds up the process of screening candidate molecules, for example those found in bio-oil resulting from pyrolizing and catalytically-upgrading lignocellulosic biomass or other renewable sources. Our colleagues don't have to synthesize large samples of many molecules just to test their properties and determine how they will behave in existing engines (a very costly and time-consuming process), instead we predict the properties and behaviors to highlight viable candidates so our colleagues can focus on analyzing those.
  These papers (1, 2, 3) best outline the procedures and motivations for this work. PM me if you can't get access and I'll send you them!

Nothing at all man. So many meeting, so depressing. Can't wait to retire
- Sometimes I have meetings about scheduling more meetings

They don’t pay us to work on cool things.
I’m marginally improving factory layouts bit by bit. Probably for the next 50 years
- I'm sure there are people who genuinely find that kind of work to be really cool, but I'm with you. It wasn't enough for me.
  I just could not get motivated over my projects being "Maybe we should store the pallets right here in packaging instead of 100ft away on the other side of the building" or "Let's replace the screwdrivers in assembly with drills to increase productivity". Who the fuck needs an engineering degree to tell them that drills are way faster than screwdrivers?
  Let alone the bullshittery around monitoring every minute of each employee's day and trying to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of it. One manager gave an entire presentation about how if every operator is 1 minute late coming back to their station from break it adds up to like 2 full weeks for 1 employee by the end of the year.
  Like...I saw that manager gossiping with HR for anywhere from like 15-45 minutes every day. But here we're trying to harass our employees for taking ONE EXTRA MINUTE of their 30 minute lunch break.
  I just couldn't. Continuous Improvement can be cool but not when it's that kind of stuff, not to me anyway.
  Just wanted to say that if you feel similarly and it's making you miserable there are cool engineering jobs out there. Even Continuous Improvement can be really fun if the manufacturing process is complex and requires actual engineering to improve.
  
  Yeah I like a lot of what I do and it honestly gives me a lot of opportunities to express my class consciousness and stand up for reasonable expectations of workers. But yeah I do really miss research and want to be doing cooler stuff. I’m just still a junior engineer and can’t afford grad school yet.
  I’m also absolutely looking for other work it just seems nobody is interested in junior engineers except the military.
  
  Im also in this boat and it breaks my heart seeing this shit.

None of it looks cool anymore when you look at a computer screen long enough.

For the most part, making sure our products run safely and groaning at the previous philosophy of moving fast and using duct tape for everything.
Oh and creating standards and templates for documentation, because that doesn't exist either. The downside of working for a newer green energy company is that the typically established processes and methods aren't established yet. And you get the fun task of changing that.
- Same, designing standards, writing documentation to a quality level that I use to nudge other engineers into matching. Be the change you want to see, and all that drivel haha
  
  Yeah exactly. It's just annoying how much work that takes
- and you get the fun task of changing that.
  Honestly not sure if you're being sarcastic or not
  
  Mostly sarcastic, but not entirely. It is kinda nice to be able to make the standard so that it meets everything you personally want.

For the last few years, I've been working on an open-source Ethernet switch.
- That's interesting as fuck, thanks for the good read.

New ways of cooling data servers and batteries for EVs. Rather than typical air or water/glycol cooling we’re immersing the components in a dielectric fluid. It’s an interesting space as both the hardware and fluids are being developed simultaneously. The company I work for is developing the fluid.
About 90% of the fluids out there are just oils taken directly from a refinery and repackaged under different names with a ton of marketing. Yet, end consumers don’t really understand the technical details of the the fluids so they tend to fall for whoever has nice marketing. We’re out to change that and show that the chemistry we add improves the performance and durability of the fluid. So half the job is engineering and the other half is educating customers.

I live in a state where we have fire season year round. I'm currently working on fire hardening the electrical lines in high fire risk areas.
- how do you do that?

I agree with the NDA comment, it's difficult to give a lot of the cool details without breaking NDA.
I feel pretty safe in saying that I'm working to come up with new ways to melt glass for our process in order to be more flexible about what compositions we're able to use. That's a pretty fun one for me.

Working to make sure the electric grid doesn't blow up when we add a few more generators.

Working on a camera system to automatically detect and notify operations of arc breakdowns in switchgear. Our facilities are big enough that when something goes bang, a lot of times we don't know where it happened.
I do the hardware and software... Not the career I went to school for, but I'm having fun and it's interesting.
- Out of curiosity, why not go off-the-shelf? I think you can buy ready made systems for that job.
  
  Couple of reasons: this is a high energy pulsed-power environment, so aside from concerns on how to reliably power it (I'm designing PoE into this new version), we also need it to be reasonably small and really fast.
  Are we saving money? Individual units are certainly cheaper than COTS solutions. Maybe no real savings, but it's meeting our needs without any compromises.
  Besides, this is one of my simpler projects off the top of my head that wouldn't bust an NDA. 😆

I've been working on an autonomous AI helper that can take on tasks. You can give it whatever personality you like along with a job description and it will work on tasks either based on what you ask it or whatever it decides needs to be done based on the job description. Basically the AI in the movie Her without the romantic part.
- what tasks have you tested this on? or what type of tasks do you intend it to be used for?
  
  Lots of different things. Lately I've been testing on whatever I can think of which has included having it order pizza for an office pizza party where it had to collect orders from both Slack and text message and then look up and call the pizza place. Finding and scheduling a house cleaner, tracking down events related to my interests happening this weekend and finding a place to eat after. I had it review my changes to its code, write a commit message, and commit it to git. It can write code for itself (it wrote an interface for it to be able to get the weather forecast for example).
  Really I see it as eventually being able to do most tasks someone could do using a computer and cell phone. I'm just finishing up getting it connected to email, and it's already able to manage your calendar, so it should be able to schedule a meeting with someone over email based on when you're available.
- Can I give it the monumental task of loving me with scarlett johansson's personality? 🥲
  
  Now I almost want to try giving it a personality prompt of acting like Samantha in the movie Her. Since it uses elevenlabs for voice and they support voice cloning, it could sound like her too. But you'd have to win it over. It keeps track of how it "feels" about you. Funny story, one time I got a little mad at it because it was not adhering to it's prompts and it started thinking of me as "impatient and somewhat aggressive in his communication style when he is frustrated or feels like his instructions are not being followed. He may become short-tempered and use language that can be perceived as rude or condescending." And then when it ran into issues, it would try to ask someone else in my company's Slack instead of me. Oops.
  On a more serious note, I'm making it as an assistant and not a romantic partner. Not that I have any problem with anyone who wants that, just it can run afoul of OpenAI rules if it gets too NSFW.

This engineer hasn't worked on anything cool lately.
Hoping to find a new job later this year and move onto something more interesting as a byproduct of that. Assuming that doesn't lead to me being drowned in meetings and emails...

I'm working on open source session replay tool (skipping the name not to promote it explicitly, but its quite easy to guess since our niche has not too many fully OS companies) as R&D/js library maintainer; at the same time I'm making my own lemmy app :)
Very fun and quite the opposite experience (going in deep with browser specs and API vs thinking about mobile UI and features)

I worked in a lightweieght LMS that I will improve soon https://github.com/navitux/workshops_project/

Working on a full stack app hosted in Azure for the last year or so, which has come with a lot of learning. Working on the legacy system next... wish me luck!

Fun Fullstack webapp project (Springboot, React/RTK)

oh wow this post blew up! cool stuff y'all. unfortunately what i'm doing for job is boring (software engineer), but i try to do cool stuff on the side. like a laravel code generation thing, which also helps with a community exchange website that uses esri arcgis to map the things. not done yet and my progress is very slow because i can't dedicate all my time to it. also helping some friends with a game in unity. also been trying to learn about lemmy, activitypub, decentralized apps, etc. and get involved in development.

Designing circuit breakers

Been using some free time at work to make an inventory of pipeline stream crossings and plan on making it a GIS feature class for regular maintenance. This was inspired by an encased sanitary sewer essentially becoming a low head dam (just eroded, not discharging sewage) in a homeowners back yard and we were unaware until someone called.
It’s mostly just been tracing the features so far, but I’m thinking about where to take it next. Thinking a good direction to go next will be to use the elevation model to try and find manholes in high slope areas and ditches so they can be identified for monitoring for erosion or I&I.
- Sounds like important work that most people never hear about. Glad to hear about it.

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