can you talk about the art installation section of your resume? it sounds really cool. how did you get into this niche and found projects? and is this kind of work not suitable as full-time freelance work?
Started with attending Burning Man starting about 12 years ago. Got jealous of my friends who were doing “real” engineering on these kinds of projects, and started volunteering, applying for and winning art grants, meeting other artists, and climbing the skill ladder.
If you attended Burning Man in 2019, Climate Week in SF in 2023, or Verge in San Jose in 2024, you may have seen my project Awful’s Gas & Snack. I also worked on the Love Blocks and the Jacks at the Conservatory of Flowers in SF (among many other projects).
I now run a small art fabrication business that just barely makes my studio rent most of the time, and is currently supplementing unemployment to pay my bills. It’s really, really hard to turn this kind of work into a livelihood, but it’s happening by necessity because I have no other work right now.
It’s also given me legitimate hardware experience — I’ve written code from scratch in Arduino and written modifications and extensions to WLED, and built custom controllers, remote sensor devices, and power systems (solar and batteries, relevant to the clean energy field). But I don’t quite know how to present this work as “legitimate”, even the stuff I’ve done as a full-fledged professional (like the work I did at Urban Putt San Jose, which you should definitely go see, it’s fun!)
This basically exists in Austria as “Altersteilzeit” [0] (“old age part time”). You even get 50% of your loss of income back through social security. So e.g. when reducing work by 40% you still get 80% of your salary. I’m guessing this is to incentivise employers to keep people near retirement employed as it would be much more expensive for the state to finance them if they were unemployed.
can you elaborate on the phone basis with engineers? I can’t really imagine how that wouldn’t be much more hassle discussing details without written documents, so I’m intrigued
The way NASA did it for decades was conference calls. Nowadays it's Teams meetings.
The outputs of the meetings are decisions that are later encoded in very many very long documents. It's just faster to hash out engineering details when the relevant engineers are able to talk to each other in real time and relevant decision makers are present to be able to unofficially bless or reject what the engineers come up with (formal acceptance of these decisions is of course a paperwork thing).
So, in this domain anyway, it's not a literal phone call. But it's what we see as the modern equivalent.
You do both, but I know at work for me the problem with written communication is we just talk past each other. Writing is, still, a very distilled and compressed medium. Meaning, a lot of the information is lost when translated to writing. I've spent weeks talking over email and on ticket just to solve it within 5 minutes on a zoom call.
A picture is worth a thousand words -- but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of a thousand words can be adequately described with pictures.
I only visit social media in browser, I don't have any social media apps installed on my phone. Safari supports user scripts which I have installed on my phone.
we're definitely under heavy load right now - might be hitting some rate limits. can you try again now? if it still doesn't work, hit me up at dli@asim.sh or on our discord https://www.asim.sh/discord and i'll get you sorted!
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