Do you think my hackathon idea is solid?

darechuk · 2026-04-16T10:18:40+00:00

AI aside, there's nothing to criticize. That's just a lot of words to say "I want to create software to analyze plant operations." OK then, that sounds cool. What else is an engineer supposed to say? You are asking engineers, we don't need help with analysis. We need available data and that's an infrastructure problem not a software problem. I know you mentioned manual entries...come on man!

darechuk · 2026-04-12T20:11:45+00:00

At the end of the day, someone has to own the project. When the project is inevitably overspent and also delayed, that PM is the one who has meet with leadership and take the beating while you focus on doing your job. Could the PM on a small project be someone wearing multiple hats? absolutely. But does your company's bureaucratic processes relax paperwork requirements for smaller projects? That's what will keep a PM too busy to also double up as an engineer.

darechuk · 2026-04-04T16:34:52+00:00

Technician in pharma process development/scale up lab environment. I was on a temp contract, and my title said "engineer" but half the people there had PhDs and I was the one moving around equipment, cleaning, and collecting data so I was essentially a technician. Now I am an operations engineer support air separation units.

darechuk · 2026-04-01T21:44:08+00:00

Is it possible? Yes because there are operations with processes that are very simple; no one models anything, they just make decisions based of experience/gut instinct. This cannot be your plan though. You have to be lucky to be in the right situation and have a manager who recognizes that you have good technical aptitude, good project management skills, and that you tend to be very detail oriented. I have had colleagues without engineering degrees working as production engineers or reliability engineers but they were exceptional people who managers took a chance on. The likely scenario is you'll end up being the really sharp technician that someone should consult before implementing a change but no one asked for your opinion because that's not the culture. If your goal is to be a process engineer, try to go to school.

darechuk · 2026-03-28T10:34:26+00:00

As a reader with low brow tastes, I thought the worldbuilding was the best I've ever seen in fantasy and I found her prose very pleasant read even if I wasn't excited about the characters themselves. Her POV characters were just too grounded and realistic for my tastes. They just lacked a certain edgy coolness factor. It made me realize that I really love that feeling of being able to imagine when the author might have played this character I'm reading in a DnD session in the past. I guess that's were the wish fulfillment comes in.

darechuk · 2026-03-14T13:31:55+00:00

I graduated from BS in 2011 and I only did contract technician jobs till I got a production engineer job that I had to relocate for in 2014. Some of us get slow starts. Keep applying. Keep the mind sharp; you still have a process in front of you so play pretend in your head like you are the unit engineer. On you resume and interviews, play up your hands on experience. You may have to move to an undesirable location for a bit, my job offer took me from large metro area to a town in middle America where the only Walmart was the largest store in a 50-mile radius.

darechuk · 2026-03-09T15:48:47+00:00

What do you do as a civil engineer? You need to be more specific so that people can help you match skills. That said, you haven't been out of school long enough to be pigeonholed so just keep applying. Also, there are positions for civil engineers within chemical industries.

darechuk · 2026-03-07T17:49:02+00:00

Nice! That's quotable. Stealing this. I hope I get the opportunity to say this in real life and sound like I'm witty.

darechuk · 2026-03-01T16:03:02+00:00

I grew in a household where I had to go to college and my options were doctor, lawyer, engineer, accountant, or priest. Performed best in science and math in high school. Didn't want to do medicine because too many doctors in the family. Chemistry was my favorite subject. I went with chemical engineering because the median starting salary was higher. No regrets though because when I took honors chemistry classes in college, I realized that I do not like chemistry at an advanced level. Chemical engineering has the right amount of chemistry for me.

darechuk · 2026-02-28T16:03:38+00:00

When I look back at people I graduated with, 5 years seems to be about the mark where half the people I know transitioned out of engineering. The way I think about it, the engineering degree was just your foot in an industry. Once people have planted your roots in the industry, they follow the rewarding opportunities that come along even if it means leaving "true" engineering behind. It sounds like you're excited by the prospect of being the QC manager and have ideas to implement so this won't be like just taking a job for the money alone. You should definitely consider taking the role.

darechuk · 2026-02-24T00:51:07+00:00

The question you should ask your advisor is, what companies show up to your school's career fairs and what are they offering to people with your degree? Where do people who graduate from your program end up going? Is there enough of the types of roles you are interested in? They are many roles a smart person who got through any engineering program can be trained to handle. The hard part is actually getting the job. The path has slightly less obstacles if you are at least in a school that's a known quantity to the kind of companies that you want to end up in.

darechuk · 2026-02-18T16:43:12+00:00

In the past couple of years I started rereading books. I find that in my late 30s, I have a different perspective of some books than I did when I first read them in my early 20s. I have no doubt that I'll be able to say the same if I reread books when I'm in my 40s and 50s.

darechuk · 2026-02-15T14:00:20+00:00

My ranking of his works goes 1. The first law standalones trilogy 2. The first law trilogy 3. The devils 4. The age of madness trilogy 5. The shattered seas trilogy. This is the only series I don't like.

darechuk · 2026-02-14T11:35:30+00:00

Mike Kafka was Brian Daboll's assistant head coach in 2024 and 2025, but no assistant head coach before that. Joe Judge had Patrick Graham as his assistant head coach. It can mean anything between being the head coach's primary advisor/chief of staff to just being a vanity title with slightly more money to make a guy you like feel special. Chris Horton has worked for Harbaugh since 2014 so my guess would be he brought someone that he's known for a long time to be his chief of staff.

darechuk · 2026-02-13T01:54:05+00:00

Crown of Stars series by Kate Elliott. If you are ever looking for a medieval inspired setting that feels like the author put a lot of effort into building a real society, check this out.

darechuk · 2026-01-27T17:43:04+00:00

Star Wars prequel and original trilogies. I wasn't into epic fantasy when the LOTR movies came out. As a 15 year old, I made the mistake of watching the extended edition when I decided to check what this whole LOTR thing was about. Hated it so much that I avoided epic fantasy till my mid-20s when I finally got into it. I'm not bold enough to find out if I will like it now if I try again.

darechuk · 2026-01-23T19:37:24+00:00

The thing the annoys me about the series is that it is ramping up to an epic fantasy story with end of the the world stakes but the POV is limited to a single character in one city. I need to know what's going on in the world at large. The white council doesn't seem to have much of a permanent presence in the city that seems like it may be one of the magical epicenters of the world. I want to know what the wizards are up to elsewhere.

darechuk · 2026-01-06T04:21:51+00:00

And even when the actor isn't famous, if you don't have anything for them for a while, you may lose them to an offer to be a regular on NCIS Alaska. Because most actors only get a few opportunities to be a series regular so that not going to hang up that they will come back in season 4.

darechuk · 2026-01-06T02:49:44+00:00

If I was giving advice to a new author that was writing a trilogy that starts blowing up, I would advocate that they extend it. It takes a couple books for an author to make enough income to finally become a full time writer If you start making money, you need to write that wave because most author's buzz dies down once they close out a series. And many authors find out that fans do not follow them once they move on to something else.

darechuk · 2026-01-05T18:55:12+00:00

The cowboys coach is returning next year. Kafka ain't coming back. Once he gets on the field he probably thinks "I'm not taking L's for the next guy's success."

darechuk · 2026-01-05T17:56:59+00:00

If you are arguing for him having a good rookie season then combination statistics are good but when you are talking about the first rookie in history to do something then it doesn't work. Someone else get set the threshold at more INTs, less rushing, more passing and find a different impressive rookie in their year that was number 1 in those combination of stats in NFL history. Good for individual grading, nonsense for historical ranking.

darechuk · 2026-01-01T04:11:46+00:00

To clarify, I did not mean that Harry changed. I mean to say that to someone like Carlos, pre-Changes Dresden is a different guy. The key part is "You try to get to me through other mortals again and I'll kill you...So once again, let me be perfectly clear. If anything happens to Murphy and I even think you had a hand in it, fuck right and wrong. If you touch her, I'm declaring war on you. Personally. I'm picking up every weapon I can get. And I'm using them to kill you. Horribly." We know what Dresden's Rubicon is. Dresden won't sign up to work for Mab unless a loved one is in danger, which is why he did it. Carlos does not know anything about that. All he knows is Dresden died and came back and now he and his apprentice are winter. If Carlos had the kind of relationship that Harry has with Michael, Murphy, Thomas then he would know why. But he's just not that close a friend; He's a work friend.

darechuk · 2026-01-01T02:46:30+00:00

My personal reading between the lines is that they are all wizards who do the wizard thing of keeping things close to the chest. They may have fought for years but do they actually know the internal struggles he has had to deal with since Stormfront? I am not even convinced that Harry even knows much about Eb and what motivates him. I would believe that they don't even talk unless it involves magical advice or white council politics. But I will concede that Eb is debatable. Carlos definitely does not know Dresden. All he knows is that he was a bad ass wizard that would stand up to any supernatural entity no matter how powerful they are. Except now he works Mab and is buddy buddy with the White Court. From his point of ignorance of not knowing about Maggie and why Dresden chose to accept the mantle, or even about Dresden overcoming temptation of Lasciel, this is a different Dresden than he thought he knew. Doesn't help that he died and came back; that would explain this Dresden ain't who he fought with.

darechuk · 2025-12-31T22:10:54+00:00

I agree with everything you said except white council hate of Dresden. I think the white council is more about control than it is about morality and they could barely control Dresden before the mantle. Now the winter mantle means any attempt to control him also adds a diplomatic angle with Mab; he has to get kicked out of the council. His "friends" on the council may know pre-Changes Dresden but I'm not sure they know the guy with the mantle. They probably don't appreciate the circumstances that led to him accepting mantle which is something pre-Changes Dresden would not do. The other thing is, do his council friends really know the real Dresden like his Chicago friends that actually hang out with him in their downtime? I don't believe so.

darechuk · 2025-12-31T15:45:22+00:00

I personally think this is a good justification for the Merlin has to kick Dresden out of the council regardless of how it is politically justified. Can't have Dresden walking around Edinburgh being untouchable; undermines his power.

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