I’ve started reading resumes from the bottom up.

What does this mean? It means I’m looking for passion. It means I’m looking for interest. It means I look for people who do electronics for fun. It means that classroom experience–while important–is not getting you the job. In fact, quite the opposite. If you’re spending all of your time in the classroom, how useful are you? Yes, understanding the basics are important. But if you’re going to quote me an equation you learned instead of going out and soldering and desoldering components to a board, how will I know that you’re a legit worker that is willing to get their hands dirty? (solder-y?)

I’m spending the day at the New York Hall of Science. It’s amazing. The venue is perfect. The swag from the OHS people and sponsors is so cool. I’m completely smitten with everyone here. I’m kind of reverting to a childhood state I’m so excited.

Why?

Well, because this feels like the beginning of something much much bigger than me and that I get to watch it unfold in front of me. And participate, that’s key as well. And since I looked for a while for people online and failed and new get to sit in a room with 200 people that do hardware, it gets me excited. These are my people. My nerdy, awesome people.

So I’ve been at ESC Boston since Monday, both as a participant and as a writer. It’s been a really cool experience meeting a lot of people in the technical writing field and a lot in the publishing industry (as well as those in the technical side of things, of course). And today for the first time, I was published in EETimes on the EELife section. Check out a couple of my articles, linked below.

So it’s quite apparent I haven’t been around posting too much. The date on the last post makes that pretty obvious. I have been doing some fun and exciting things though!

First off is The Amp Hour, a new electronics podcast/radio show. We just completed our 8th episode yesterday and it seems to be going well! We were very lucky to have much of Dave Jones’ wonderful community at EEVblog make the jump over and listen to us. It’s nice to have a strong base of listeners to start with and we appreciate everyone of them (I appreciate you doubly if you happen to read here as well!).

I know we said we wouldn’t talk about it on our sites any more, but I figured once more can’t hurt. We have our latest episode of The Amp Hour up on the new website, just waiting to be downloaded or streamed.

I will say though that you should pull the RSS feed ASAP in order to not miss any future radio shows. Who knows what kind of hijinks you’d miss out on?

A note about part reviews: I do not get paid to do reviews. I am either doing them out of the kindness of my heart, because they have some historical significance (as in the case of my review of the LM741) or most likely I think the technology is important and interesting. All opinions are my own and I would not suggest making any part choices based on the information in this article alone. Read some datasheets, they’re pretty informative.

I really don’t have much to say in response to my last post about where all the electrical engineer sites are online other than: message boards. I alluded to the idea of message boards when I mentioned EEVBlog, though unknowningly at the time; I thought EEVblog was only videos. Working with Dave on The Amp Hour has shown me that a message board can really help hash out ideas (if you’re one of the content generators), get suggestions, or get questions answered (if you’re watching or reading and don’t understand something).  So I started hunting and found some other quite active electronics-only forums:

We finished recording the 3rd installment of our newly-named radio show–“The Amp Hour”–last night. The show focused on a couple different topics, we were trying to stay a little bit more focused than we had been previously. Anyway, be sure to click the link above to get to the podcast/radio show, I don’t plan on putting the audio on this page anymore. I would also suggest that you try out the RSS feed on The Amp Hour, it’s the easiest way to get up to date info on the program; plus I’d like to discontinue posting that there is a new episode up on both that site and this one.

Dave and I have decided to move the radio show we started together to a separate site. We also chose a name for the site, The Amp Hour.

Going to a different site will allow Dave to continue providing video podcasts on the EEVblog site and I can continue providing analog type articles (and podcasts) on this site.  Our content will appear there from now on, but we’ll be sure to link over to that site for the next few shows to ensure people know where the audio files can be found.

Dave and I have recorded our second radio show. Still no name for the show, or else it would be posted at a different site than this one.  If this show happens to inspire an idea for you, please leave your idea in the comments.

[display_podcast]

Links discussed in the show:

• MAKE magazine’s review of Maker Faire Detroit (learning to solder)
• NYT article about mineral deposits in Afghanistan
• Antipasto Hardware Blog — Graphing Calculator on the Beagle Touch
• Anduino Wiki Page
• Maker Faire NYC Tickets

We would love any feedback either in the comments or at the EEVblog forum (there is a specific section for the radio show).