My first real job was in 1985 with EP Technologies, working on the EPT-1000 Cardiac Ablation System for treatment of irregular heartbeat. I’ve been involved with Product Design and Development ever since. The job was a good fit for me and being a start-up, I was allowed to ‘wear many different hats’. I started as an Electronics Technician, doing assembly and re-work, which gave me a crash course in component-level electronics troubleshooting procedures. In 1987, I was promoted to Electronics Production Supervisor.

In 1989 SGI was riding high, and I was looking for new challenges, so I took a job in the Entry Systems Division. I started as a Technician IV, providing general support for three different hardware groups. In 1990, I moved into a Jr. Mechanical Designer position. I began using design and analysis tools like Pro/ENGINEER and Flotherm to help develop mechanical and thermal solutions for SGI’s power-hungry workstations. I was lucky to be directly involved with 5 individual products from concept to production during my four years at SGI.

Having been using Pro/ENGINEER full-time for 3 years by this time, I left SGI in 1993 to start Mechanistic, my freelance Product Design consultancy. Mechanistic provided product design services from concept ideation to manufacturing support, specializing in the creation of highly complex, organic surfaces in Pro/ENGINEER. Over the next 10 years, I was fortunate to be directly involved with 22 individual successful commercial products from start to finish.

Being a one-person technical service provider required to seamlessly integrate with my client’s existing development team provided several technical challenges. One of the primary issues was revision-control and change management of the CAD deliverables. I began using Pro/PDM to manage and provide high availability to all product data through Pro/PDM’s retirement in 2001. I’ve been using and administering Pro/INTRALINK, now simply referred to as Windchill, since then.

In 2003, I took a Sr. Mechanical Designer position at Digidesign, where I have been for the last 3+ years.