Being an Engineer

Being an Engineer is a long-running interview series about the practical discipline of engineering and adjacent technical work. Its center of gravity is the working detail. The show is most interested in how people solve problems once the whiteboard idea meets a shop floor, a customer, a regulator, a deadline, or a team. Recent episodes make that pattern clear. Joe Couitt talks through Swiss machining from the perspective of someone who has programmed machines, trained shops, serviced equipment, and built a business around hands-on process knowledge. The conversation gets small in a useful way. Dowel pins, tool blanks, setup work, customer debugging calls, and workflow balance all become part of the engineering story. Chad Walters brings industrial design into the same practical frame. His episode treats color, controls, Adobe Illustrator, sketching tools, and client storytelling as engineering-adjacent decisions that affect whether a product makes sense to users and businesses. Mustafa Poonawala shifts the lens to diagnostics and clinical trials. His discussion connects complex systems, failure, resilience, AI-supported execution, clinical evidence, reporting, and the decision latency that slows regulated product development. Brad and Aaron bring the focus back inside engineering organizations. Their conversation about accelerating engineering speed covers meetings, informal forums, trust, output versus effort, and the cultural structures that help teams move faster without pretending every process is equally valuable. Across these topics, the show’s style is steady and grounded. It asks follow-up questions until the work becomes visible. It suits listeners who want engineering knowledge from people who have handled constraints directly, not just talked around them.