My name is Ryan Taylor and I'm a Systems Engineer here at DMC. Yeah, there are a lot of things that I like about working at DMC. First is something that everyone is probably going to tell you, at least the engineers will tell you, that everyday you could be working on some totally random, brand new technology. So it's very interesting to come in and potentially have to do something you've never done before. You get the opportunity to learn and grow technically as a result. Even if I did telemarketing here, I would probably be tempted to stay just because the people I work with are great.
Definitely one of the most interesting applications, something I would have never thought about before working on it, is there's a customer that basically creates the raw materials for what we print, silicon wafers, to print integrated circuits onto. I've gotten a lot of exposure to C# and .Net, WPF, the more HMI booming related technologies, things that I never would thought I'd be involved with coming out of college.
I did a Raspberry Pi project that I actually blogged about on the DMC website, basically making a CTA Transit tracker, something that tracks how close the nearest CTA bus was to my apartment so that I could have a good gauge of how fast I needed to get ready in the morning just because I tend to sleep in and wait too long to get ready.
Spring break of my junior year of high school, one of my friends and I were stuck in Lafayette, Indiana, which is where I grew up. So we decided to make a project called Spring Broken, which was a trebuchet, basically, that we would build during spring break. So we went to a lumber yard and got the cheapest lumber we could get and some hand tools and basically created a trebuchet. It was about eight feet high and ended up being a great success.
Recently, being two weeks ago, one of my co-workers motivated me to sign up for a triathlon. I'd never done one before and I hadn't really been training for it but I did it last weekend and it actually turned out really good and I think that 's going to be something I do more frequently.
The biggest thing I do outside of work is play bass in a band, a local band called One Season. I put most of my free time into that and I like playing music, practicing for it, doing artwork for it. So there's a lot of effort that goes into it that is very rewarding. One of the things we have difficulty is describing to people what it is so we call it Omni-Rock, and kind of cover as much as we can. We just played our biggest show of the year/ever at Lincoln Hall, which is another one of the best venues in Chicago in my opinion. We had a lot of DMC people come out, including Frank, which was awesome and it seemed to go off really well. I had a great time.