After decades of engineering work focused on keeping silicon alive in the real world — learning from and teaching engineers and scientists far smarter than myself — I’ve collected a few hard-earned thoughts on education (for kids and PhDs alike), reliability in complex systems, and why we keep building more and more stuff that survives less and less time before heading to the landfill.
Welcome to the world of Electrostatic Discharge, Electromagnetic Compatibility, industry textbooks, and children’s picture books… the Mos Eisley of Electrical Engineering. Nobody wants to visit until their design is on fire, their product is failing in the field, and they suddenly need a pilot and a fast ship to fly them past their Darth Vaders.
You’ve heard that AI will take all the jobs. Even artists and writers? Not in this case!
From pencil sketches to funny AI fails and hours of old-fashioned digital painting, making The Wonderful Wizard of Electronics proved that AI is a powerful sidekick, but not the main character. That still comes from stubborn human creativity.
I watched a kid’s eyes light up at our book fair when a simple J-FET transistor switched an LED with nothing but static electricity from a rubbed plastic cup. No code, no battery switch, no microcontroller. That moment is scarce. We’ve convinced a generation or more that every blinking light needs software and a 32-bit brain. My day job fighting reliability battles in real silicon has taught me otherwise.
You hand a kid a robot kit and ten minutes later they’ve "pretty much built a little Roomba" and everyone cheers. But a few years later they’re in their first job staring at a real production problem they don’t understand, wondering why it only fails on Tuesdays. After decades designing hardware that has to survive the real world, I’ve learned the hard part isn’t the fun proto: it’s the physics and math in the design, and failure analysis of the disaster that make things actually work when it counts.
A version of this article appeared in the Spring 2025 SEA Homeschoolers Magazine
By choosing durable devices, repairing instead of replacing, and slowing the upgrade cycle, families can significantly reduce their e-waste footprint and push back against planned obsolescence. Don't litter the world with dead laptops, old washing machines and...protest signs that don't address the real problems!