The Itinerant Engineer

I’ve been trying to do a startup for a while. I’ve found one I like, and if something good comes out of our negotiations this week, I’ll be exceedingly pleased.

This job won’t pay cash, so I decided to start another company to do consulting and contracting while I build the startup: Prefiat LLC. The company is a boutique hardware/software agency and is available for hire immediately. I just put up the website today, and I have to say, I’m starting not to suck as badly as I used to at web design.

I received the completed boards from the cerebral palsy project from BatchPCB today. After soldering down all the components, I plugged it in, and it worked right away. As an unexpected bonus, I got eight free copies of the board—I’m guessing they had some free space on the production run, and decided to stick a few small ones (mine) in along the edges.

Next comes experiments with switching and software. I spoke about this project at Ignite last Thursday; I’ll post the talk here when it’s available. In the mean time, check out the media section for the slides.

When I was younger, my father advised me to “try to avoid dealing with the general public” in my professional life. “I really have to hand it to the receptionists, police officers, and DMV workers of the world, for having the patience to put up with rudeness and disrespect all day long, and smile about it. I wouldn’t last a day in a job like that.”

To the extent that one can control who one does business with, there’s a lot of wisdom in that. The average American is overweight, and in debt. Most marriages end in divorce. Entire industries (video rental and credit cards, for example) derive significant revenue from peoples’ inability to follow through on their commitments.

My dad’s not an elitist, he just doesn’t take people at their word, unless he has reason to.

It’s easy for my dad to make a statement like that, though, because he’s spent the majority of his working life dealing with a small number of highly-qualified professional colleagues inside corporate America. When you’re on the outside, selling, things get a lot murkier. To what authority can one appeal, when a customer is being unreasonable? What to do, when someone refuses to pay? And how can one know another’s character, prior to doing business with them?

Doing business with great people is a privilege, something to fight for, not a right.