Nerd Nuggets – ZachScott.net

August 9, 2021August 9, 2021

Elon Musk’s 5 Step Engineering Process

Nestled amongst this fascinating 3 part interview that Everyday Astronaut conducted with Elon Musk, is a nugget of engineering gold. Elon describes the 5 step engineering process he uses to build speed and efficiency at his companies(starts about 13 minutes into the video). Touring the under construction Starbase in south Texas, Elon shares the 5 steps outlined below as well as a wealth of information about Space X and Starship. Check out the video, after watching it, I have to see this place with my own eyes.

Make your requirements less dumb: “The requirements are definitely dumb, it doesn’t matter who gave them to you. It’s particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements because you might not question them as thoroughly as you would if a dumb person gave you them.”
- Any requirement/constrain needs to be attached to person, not a department. You can question a person, you can’t question a department. This ensures ownership and avoids “that’s the way it has always been done” thinking.
Try to delete the part or process: Find what is truly required, “if you aren’t occasionally adding things back in, you’re not deleting enough. This bias tends to be very strongly towards, let’s add this part or process step in case we need it” It is easy to overengineer, but difficult to keep things simple.
Simplify or Optimize: “possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist” Perfect the part or processes for quality before engineering for speed. Reduce or eliminate variation and defects in the process.
Accelerate Cycle Time: “Go Faster, but not until you’ve worked on the other three things first… if you’re digging your grave, don’t dig it faster, stop digging your grave.” Now that you have a quality part or process, eliminate waste where possible to accelerate the process.
Automate: Eliminate waste, don’t automate waste. “I’ve made the mistake of going backwards on all 5 steps, multiple times…” Elon describes a great example from the Telsa Model 3 battery pack manufacturing process that included a fiberglass mat that wasn’t even really required once Elon dove deep on the process.

July 14, 2011

Woot Arduino Printer

I recently bought the Ardunio inventors kit from Sparkfun to play around with the Arduino and I’ve been looking for a project to make with it when I saw DangerousPrototypes Thermal Twitter Printer based on their web platform. I thought that I could build upon that and use the Arduino and add and LCD to it.
Enter the finished product

It uses the Arduino, Arduino Ethernet Sheild, a serial enabled LCD, and thermal printer from Sparkfun. It works by scraping a couple of twitter rss feeds and outputting the results. The LCD parses the @wootoff twitter account and formats the results to start with the price. It checks for updates about every minute. In my next version I’d like to add a last call notification to the display.

The printer works in a simpler function and pulls tweets from the @wootchatter account that are also displayed on Woot’s community forum. I use several variables to save the last printed tweet and check it each time that the rss feed is parsed to make sure that it is not printing the same tweet every minute. In the next version I’d like to make some better formatting of the tweets to make them more readable and stand out more.

November 2, 2009

Put This On

Put This On, Episode 1: Denim from Put This On on Vimeo.

The first episode of “Put This On,” a video podcast that comes from two “Monsters of Podcasting” Jesse Thorn (host of “The Sound of Young America” & “Jordan, Jesse, Go”) and Adam Lisagor (member of the “You Look Nice Today” podcast) made it’s web debut today. Put This On is a change from the normal tech based talk that often comes to mind when talking about podcasts. Put this On also is different in how it got started, they used Kickstarter.com to help raise funds to get the podcast project started. Kickstarter.com is a site that touts itself as ” A New Way to Fund Ideas and Endeavours” and provides a place for those with an idea and the willingness to to the footwork to gain funds to get started. Many of the Kickstarter.com projects come from artists wanting to make a book, record a new album, and other projects of the like. Thorn and Lisagor were able to use Kickstarter.com in a way to test the virtual waters to see if their idea for Put this One would work and to attract sponsors and gain the startup cash to get the series started right.

Thorn and Lisagor were looking for $1,500 to start “Put this On,” and within days of announcing their intentions and using twitter to get the word out quickly exceeded their initial goal and at the end of the funding round had pledges from people and businesses in total of more than $3,900. In full disclosure, I was one of the backers pitching in a couple of bucks to the cause. Most of the donnors pledged fifty dollars or less while Metafilter.com (a longtime sponsor of Thorn’s other podcasts) stepped up with $1,500 in return for a post-roll advertisment by Thorn and Lisagor that airs at the end of each episode.

The production value of “Put this On” is excellent and should serve as an example for anyone who wants to start a video podcast and really shows that online video has grown up to take on old media. Certainly, anyone who has ever worn jeans or ever will should check out the first episode of “Put this On.” I think the use of Kickstarter.com is an interesting development in the world of podcasting. It is a twist on the donation model that many podcasters have tried, but with varying degrees of success. Not only do the donnors have the enjoyment of seeing the project come into reality, but they also feel a sense of ownership as they were there on the ground floor, getting the project started. It will be interesting to see what Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor come up with in future episodes of “Put this On” as they attempt to educate people on how to dress like grownups. I will admit that I could use the advice as there was a period in middle school where I wore sweatpants everyday, and despite what Michael Jordan’s hanes commercials would lead you to believe, sweatpants will not help your jump shot or help you in the ladies department either.

September 23, 2009

Revision3 Launches an Online Sitcom

At the end of this week’s Diggnation (episode 221) Kevin and Alex show a trailer for a new show Revision3 that is launching on October 7th. The show, Web Zeroes, is a departure from the normal variety and current events programs that make up the rest of the Rev3 lineup. The show is centered around three best friends living in Houston, TX that aspire to become internet superstars. Check out the trailer below.

September 21, 2009

Dr. Horrible Sing-Along Blog on the Emmys

Last week Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog made news winning the first Emmy for a show that never aired on TV. This was just another in the line of firsts that Dr. Horrible’s has blazed since it debuted on the net last year and became a run-away success, showing that the internet TV business model could be profitable. Last night Dr. Horrible broke into the Emmy broadcast in a skit that poked fun at the advancing new media early day technological problems. Some on twitter found the skit in poor taste, but think it is just cute as the old media is trying to combat new media and we will see who will have the last laugh as more and more of our entertainment is found online.

July 25, 2009

Where did all my followers go?

Many twitterers awoke Friday morning to find that they had a significant drop in the number of people following them. On Thursday, twitter admins pushed several changes through the system to help identify and clean out spam accounts as well as clear up some lingering database issues that reported incorrect data for some users. I, myself, saw a drop of more that 60 followers following the recent change. As one might imagine, the sudden and drastic change in follower count alarmed and angered many users. I feel these users don’t really “get” twitter and are fixated on increasing the number of followers they have, but I feel they are really missing out on what twitter can offer to those who engage in the community and provide useful content.

photo credit: playerx

Having been a twitter user since January 2007, I can regale new users of a time when there was free access to the public time-line, and the top users were almost exclusively the nerd famous, with the top user with the most followers switching back and forth between Leo Laporte and Kevin Rose. Those times are now just a distant memory as twitter has become infiltrated by spammers and self branded social media experts. Not long after twitter integrated the trending topics section into the main site design, did those topics become the opponent’s flag in a online capture the flag game where spammers latched on to twitter and spew forth their wares in attempts to gain the recognition of being on the trending topics list. Trending topics is a whole other issue as its usefulness has decreased and doesn’t give any back story as to why something is a trending topic. When you click on a trending topic in hopes to find out why it is a trending topic, you are bombarded with dozens of users tweeting out that same question as well as an alarming amount of users that send out tweets just listing all the trending topics in hopes that someone will click and follow them.

Fighting spam is something that twitter has to be very proactive in if they are not turn into a myspace of friendster. If twitter were a comedy club, spammers would be hecklers shouting out nonsense in attempts to get attention. The spammers feel they have a right to be there, but are ruining the show for everyone else that came to the show. To the people dismayed at their loss of their fake followers, I say get evolved, and engage users; if you provide value to people they will follow you. The true value of twitter is in the conversation.

June 25, 2009

Wordcamp Dallas this Weekend

This weekend is the second year for Wordcamp Dallas. The two day event is being held at the UT Dallas School of Management. I didn’t go last year and I signed up months ago and have been counting the days till the geekout event this weekend. I really like the power that WordPress gives me to mange my content and I use WordPress on most of my sites. I think it will be a great opportunity to meet with other geeks and since its at UTD its my home turf. It will be a great networking oportunity (even though I really hate the “N” word) and hope to learn some things to help step up my game. I’ll be blogging and twittering a lot this weekend, so let me appologize right now.

Wordcamp Dallas

April 26, 2009

New Year’s Resolutions

It may by April, but with a quarter of this year already behind me I have a better idea and a better chance of keeping with my New Year’s Resolutions. More of a todo list than normal resolutions.
(in no particular order)

1. Start my own business
2. Loose weight
3. Start video podcast
4. Graduate college
5. Pay down credit card debt
6. Learn to play the guitar. (real kind, not just the rockband kind)
7. Brew my own beer
8. Apply to grad school