Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6 E44 Ryan Stevenson | Working on Apple’s Vision Pro & Launching a Freelance Engineering Business
Ryan Stevenson is a versatile mechanical engineer whose career spans high-profile tech companies, outdoor gear innovators, and entrepreneurial ventures. After earning his Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Boise State University, Ryan launched into product development roles that combined advanced CAD, manufacturing engineering, and user-focused design.
He contributed to Apple’s Vision Products Group, where he helped shape the Vision Pro by developing complex surfaces and leading the design of components in the Light Seal system. Earlier, at Cascade Designs, Ryan worked on next-generation Thermarest products, applying his technical expertise to foam development and manufacturing challenges. At Werner Paddles, he engineered advanced composite paddles and tooling, bringing efficiency improvements to production while driving performance in outdoor equipment.
Ryan’s entrepreneurial side came alive with Realtime Adventure Data, where he co-founded the company and led development of the Lyte Probe, a device designed to help backcountry skiers better assess avalanche risk. He thrives at the intersection of rapid prototyping, design for manufacturability, and customer-driven problem solving.
Most recently, Ryan founded the Boise Hardware Meetup, building community for engineers, designers, and makers in Idaho. As a freelance engineer through Syzygy Design, he now partners with companies ranging from startups to established manufacturers, offering expertise in CAD modeling, mechanical architecture, DFM/DFA, and full product development cycles. His career reflects not only technical depth but also a passion for leadership, collaboration, and bridging the gap between industrial design and scalable manufacturing.
LINKS:
Guest LinkedIn: Ryan Stevenson - Boise Hardware Meetup | LinkedIn
Guest website: https://ryanstevenson.xyz/
Aaron Moncur, host
Download the Essential Guide to Designing Test Fixtures: https://pipelinemedialab.beehiiv.com/test-fixture
About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
Ryan, hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast today. We're joined by Ryan Stevenson, a freelance mechanical engineer and organizer of the Boise hardware meetup with experience ranging from Product Design at Apple to outdoor gear innovation at Cascade designs and werter paddles, Ryan has worked across industries from consumer electronics to composites and even locomotives. He now helps companies of all sizes bring hardware products from concept to commercialization, while fostering community among engineers in Boise Ryan, thanks so much for being with us on the show
Ryan Stevenson:today. Yeah, thank you for having me.
Aaron Moncur:All right, so I have to ask you, given that you have some experience with locomotives, apparently, Do people ever confuse the kind of engineer that you are
Ryan Stevenson:no but you would think they would these days. I'm not sure the vernacular for engineer is still as popular with locomotives these days. I think most people associate engineer with college educated people that build products or code or something like that these days.
Aaron Moncur:So yeah, these days, that's probably the case. Yeah, the previous generation. Maybe I know a couple of times earlier on in my career, I had that question, and it was serious. I thought they were joking. At first, I was like, Come on, man. Anyway, all right, so the first serious question for Ryan, what made you decide to become an engineer?
Ryan Stevenson:Yeah, I knew this question was coming, actually, and I had to think long and hard about it. I feel like a lot of people on your podcast grew up playing with Legos and building things and characterizing things and all that stuff. That's not really what I did as a kid. I played a lot of video games. I rode my bike around being able to hoodle them. It wasn't until really I went I got out of high school. I was playing the old Community College. My dad, at the time, was asking what I wanted to do, and I didn't know, so I said something along lines of, just go for business. I don't know why not. Seems like a reasonable option, and I had always done really well in maths and, like, physics type classes. So he basically said to me, You're pretty smart. Why don't you try something harder? Basically, no offense to just majors out there. But so, I mean, that's what I did. I was like, All right, I was kind of joking. We said, I'll be a rocket scientist jumping. So I that's what I originally intended to do, was aerospace engineering, but went into biomedical engineering because Tennessee, at the time had a program that allowed to get in state tuition. Whole story behind that, but yeah, that's, that's the short version, just kind of on a whim, honestly, nice.
Aaron Moncur:So you, you went through college, and then was, was Apple, the first company where you worked? Or was that a little bit down the road?
Ryan Stevenson:No, that was far down the road. Oh, the last company I work for technically in so I went to grad school at Boise State after undergrad in Tennessee. Reasoning being, I really liked kayaking and mountain biking and going to grad school, on me to keep doing more of that while getting more of education, which I valued. So I did that. I actually had a startup of my own in grad school, a buddy of mine named Micah Johnson. We're in same classes, and he had this idea for a ski pole with sensors in it that would send the stratigraphy of the layers of the snowpack to your phone, essentially. And if you don't know what that means, basically layers of the snowpack, it's for assessing safety in the backcountry. So I was doing that in grad school, and then as soon as I got out, I got a job with company called SGW design works as a contractor, as a at a locomotive manufacturer here in Boise, who's no longer here anymore. So I was kind of doing both at the same time. I was doing the locomotive job and the startup at the same time, right after grad school.
Aaron Moncur:All right? Well, tell me a little bit about the locomotive job, because I don't know that I've ever talked with an engineer who worked on locomotives.
Ryan Stevenson:Yeah, it's neither have I, I guess, since now I think about it, other than myself and co workers I had formerly. But yeah, locomotives are really fascinating in that they are made here in a town like Boise. You wouldn't think it, but such heavy mechanical equipment has to be made somewhere, right? And doesn't make sense to ship it on a container. So, yeah, they're made here in the United States. It's a lot of weld mints, a lot of sheet metal, a lot of grease, big, huge engines powering the fang castings. Yeah, think of it. Think of the largest machine you can think of, and that's like a locomotive, you know, you're getting in there, getting dirty, all kinds of stuff
Aaron Moncur:like that. So, yeah, it seems like there's like this polar opposite contrast between div. Developing a locomotive. And then something like the vision Pro that you worked on at Apple, right? The locomotive, big, greasy, not super precise, I would imagine. And then the vision Pro, like ultra precise, intense, probably cutting edge manufacturing processes going on. Is that an accurate statement? Or am I off there at all? No,
Ryan Stevenson:that's extremely accurate. I mean, we think, like, if you were to look at the tolerance block on a locomotives for any part, versus something that's going into vision Pro, yeah, you could not be further apart. As far as tolerances go. I think that. I think the first decimal point, I think most tolerances on the locomotive are, like, 10th of an inch or something crazy. It's like, you know, okay, you're never even gonna hit that, like, close to that on something going on in apple. Pro, so, yeah, way different, not only from like, a culture standpoint, what you're doing on a day to day basis, but also just from the product itself, as far as manufacturing techniques, I don't think, I can't think of any weld giant or weldness in vision. Pro, off top my head. You know, it's just not something that's used. It's very different manufacturing processes.
Aaron Moncur:How did the experience contrast for you? I mean, working on such polar opposite products and processes was, was there one that you preferred greatly over the other? Or were both like super fun and in their own way.
Ryan Stevenson:Yeah, they were, they were just very different for obvious, like, the obvious reasons I just explained, and then they were just a very different points in my advice as well. Like the locomotive job was the first thing I did, basically right out of grad school. So that was just a fairly big marine experience, just trying to get my seat under me understand manufacturing processes. It was helpful in that I could go see what was going on and talk to people that were actually doing the welding and putting these things together, and figure out why I can make something a certain way, kind of like a bootcamp or DFM, if you will, for that particular process. Whereas at Apple, much older, I was, like, was that 22 so, like, seven years after the locomotive job. Just vastly different culture, you know, like, there's dude smoking cigarettes and all kinds of things on the on the job at the locomotive place or whatever. It's not gonna find that like a tech firm. It's just very different culture you're using CMS over in Asia, vastly different communication styles and things you're looking for. So, yeah, I mean, I can't really think of anything that could be further apart, I guess, in a ways, like okamotos versus something like the vision Pro, yeah, did I answer your question?
Aaron Moncur:Well, let's talk. I want to talk a little bit more about the vision Pro, I mean, that's one of the more interesting products out there on the market. I think, full disclosure, I've never used one, but they look incredible, and probably there are some quirks right now, like limited applications for it, but hopefully it keeps growing over the years and it becomes, you know, mainstream at some point, what were, what was your to the extent that you can say, of course, I'm sure some of this is still confidential, but in what, how are you involved with the development of the vision Pro, and if you can speak to it, what were, what are two of the most challenging aspects of that development?
Ryan Stevenson:Yeah, I think one of the biggest challenges was really just being when I came to Apple, the vision Pro was fairly late in the development. They're really trying to push to get this thing to market, and there's just still a large amount of things that need to be done, frankly. So I think just me plop into that atmosphere of we have stuff to do now really fast. It's just an intense environment, and you're just trying to hammer and get stuff done as fast as possible, a lot of learning. I mean, Apple has its own ecosystem that you're trying to get assimilated into with all the various tools and the people you're meeting, all these new people. So that was just that was just a real challenge. What is incredibly impressive, though, is just the amount of data that goes into the design you know this, especially the vision Pro. You have this area of your face that's being contacted by the light seal, which is one aspect of the vision Pro that I worked on, this part of your face is incredibly diverse across the entire population, and to have all that data point assimilated into I think they have, they got down to like seven SKUs is it takes in a ton of analysis and data and just engineering to figure out how you're going to bring something like that to market and also make it safe. Part of the thing that I worked on at Apple was sort of more of the structural components in the light seal. I didn't do FDA on it. They have a whole team dedicated to that, but certainly part of the design process, tiny parts, because when you fall on your face, you don't want, like, the optics to crash into your eyeballs, and that's a real risk. So that's something you have to worry about. Yeah, it's just an incredible piece of engineering all around. So to answer your question, I worked on the light seal, some of the light seal components with a team of people. And then one of the other projects I worked on was sort of the cover design, like the inbox cover that the fishing Pro comes with, the one that's in the box right now is like this really slick soft goods part that, like sock based. That goes over the lens. I didn't develop that one, but we were on, like, a parallel path with that one. Nice.
Aaron Moncur:Do you remember the first time you put the vision Pro on when it was, you know, more or less functional? And what was that like? Like experiencing this pretty groundbreaking product for the first time? I
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Ryan Stevenson:It's just a, you know, I was never really a VR person, so there's, like, other headsets, like quest and things like that. I never really played with those. So when I put on the vision Pro, and it was still in, like, a beta version, it's just something, it's just a completely different experience versus a traditional computer, like, I'm staring at you through a screen. It's all to D essentially. That's not what the vision Pro is. Like, you're putting it on, you're seeing these photos and things in three dimensional. You kind of have to wrap your head around it a little bit and how to control you're just using your hands. So it's just a mind boggling that might be a bit hyperbolic, but it's just, it's just very unique experience to, like, wrap your head around how that kind of technology works essentially, yeah,
Aaron Moncur:yeah. Of course, no one can predict the future, but if you were to look into your own crystal ball, do you think the future is is built around that type of technology, where, you know XR type technology, you're looking into some kind of glasses or goggles and everything around you and hand gestures to control things, or do you think we still have a long ways to go with with our somewhat archaic computer systems? Gosh, it's a good
Ryan Stevenson:question. I think it's gonna depend on the next generation. By that, I mean, like my kids, or like even the Gen Z, what they want to do, because I like using a computer. I'm pretty sad my ways. I think there's some really cool technology, like Microsoft has their HoloLens for use on like manufacturing Forge, you can see the drawings in real time. I think that's a really cool application of VR technology. So I know that's hard to say. Most likely it will go towards more VR, more 3d spatial type things. I don't have a crystal ball, of course, but I can definitely see that being the evolution. I mean, I just feel like computers are so good now, like laptops. I mean, where? How much better can you get those really? I mean, I feel like the innovation pipeline, if you will, has to go that way. I mean, it just makes sense to me.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, let's change gears a little bit and talk about what you're doing for work now. What was that transition? Like you're freelancing right now you're taking on jobs under your own umbrella. How did that come about?
Ryan Stevenson:Yeah, good question. Um, so I had left to move back to Boise with my family at the time, my wife got residency here in Boise, so wasn't an option for me to work remotely for apple here in Boise, so I decided to take some time off. I took a year off, essentially something, I can't remember the exact months, but tried some other things, right, like day trading, for instance, other various ways to make money. But I mostly just hung out my daughter and just had fun, took a year off, and the freelance thing came about because I had a buddy of mine used to work with that cascade. He reached out and said, Are you looking for work, basically, and at the time, I wasn't working. I was like, Sure. Why not? Yeah, so I kind of put the bug in my beer, and that was just like a little thing, just like, why can't I keep doing this essentially, you know, keep trying to do this indefinitely. So that's what I that's what I'm doing. I'm trying to make a go of it now, being freelance for myself,
Aaron Moncur:that's awesome. Congratulations. I'm hearing some parallels between your story and mine. I mean, some, not all for sure, but there was a period in my life when I I just wanted to try something different, and so I had a photography company with a buddy of mine. I did like web design for a little while, I was looking at commercial, real estate, just completely different things. I never really left engineering. I did all these things, kind of as side hustles. Ultimately came back to, or just continued with, with engineering. So how long have you been freelancing at this point?
Ryan Stevenson:Gosh. Let me think here. So I did a little bit back in April of I guess, if I counted everything, probably about 16 months. But really, I've been focusing hard on it, like the last year. So I'll just say about a year or
Aaron Moncur:so. Okay, what would have been a few of the most rewarding and the most challenging aspects of doing your own thing? Yeah.
Ryan Stevenson:I mean, it's sort of like a double edged sword. So the most rewarding part is I get set my own schedule. I don't have to fill out a PTO form, anything like that. I don't I just work when I work and I try to provide value for my clients. The flip side is that I don't have any consistent income whatsoever, so I'm not getting a paycheck every two weeks, which, that's the trade off, right? You're trading your time for money. So if you don't have work coming in, you're not actively trying to actively trying to get work, you're not getting paid. So I think from a accounting standpoint, that's probably the most challenging part. I really just like working freelancing tends to focus on small, medium sized businesses. I just like those kind of clients personally, too. I have nothing against larger clients, but I just feel like they're sort of underrepresented in a lot of underrepresented in a lot of respect, especially with engineering. They come in without a real large depth of knowledge, so to speak, about the various processes of how to make a product. And that's kind of fun to educate people on those things. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:we have a connection through the hardware meetup. You started the Boise chapter and I started the Phoenix chapter. Tell us a little bit about the hardware
Ryan Stevenson:meetup. Yes, that came about because I had reached out to a former co worker of mine at Penn and Rob Leonard, asking him, is he basically had any work, I mean? And he said, I don't, but there's this group called informal, which you've interviewed Sam Holland already. So he made it. He told me to connect with them and name drop him, which I did. So I got to talking with Sam and Nate. And Nate runs the hardware meetup collective, if you will. So I got to talk with Nate, and essentially, the conversation led to, Boise doesn't have a hardware meetup. Why not? Why don't I just go for it? You know, just why not? I mean, what do I have to lose? It's sort of like my mindset for a lot of things. But why not try and see if there's any traction here and Boise, not a small city by any stretch, but it doesn't have say the product design traction that a lot of other cities do. So I think there was a bit of hesitation from some of the people I had talked to about the whole idea, but I've been going really well, and there's just people out there wanting to nerd out on hardware and connect and learn cool things. So it's been a real pleasant surprise with the Boise harbor meetup so
Aaron Moncur:far. That's cool. How long have you been doing it? Since last November?
Ryan Stevenson:So we just did our third one at SGW. When was that last? End of September, we did that. So, yeah, we just finished our third hardware meetup. So about a year, I'll be about a year here, coming up soon, toward four things like that.
Aaron Moncur:Terrific. Yeah, awesome. All right, let's go back to your your freelance work here, just for a bit. What? What's a typical project like for you? I'm guessing there probably is no typical project. But what's a day in the life like for Ryan Stevenson these days? Yeah, typical
Ryan Stevenson:project. And as you noted, it's kind of varied. Mostly, it's been consumer electronics. That seems to be a thing lately people need help with is consumer electronics. A guy come to me about wanting to make a charger for a apple mouse. For instance, things I get through informal are mostly consumer electronics. Could be a toy. For instance, one client I'm working with, I'm helping him make a temperature gun with some advanced sensors in there for super accurate temperature measurement. So it seems to be the hot thing these days in the hardware realm, at least, is consumer electronics. I don't get a lot of, like, machine design type projects or anything of that nature. It's mostly consumer electronics. I'm trying to think really well said. Bin, yeah, there's a guy who came to me for like, a drone product, which is basically a consumer electronic in some respects. So, yeah, that seems to be a lot thing these days. Nice hardware should be having a renaissance, which is kind of cool.
Aaron Moncur:That's awesome, yeah, what do you like working on the most? I mean, how much of a background do you have any electronics? Is that something you picked up along the way? Is it what you want your focus to be?
Ryan Stevenson:Yeah, I like it. I think the cool thing about consumer electronics, and I really stove hard into this. When I started working for pennsyl. I'd sort of done the outdoor industry for several years prior to that. It's just a very innovative segment of engineering. There's so much, just so many ideas like crazy things like, there's like, the things I wouldn't even think of that people are trying to do with consumer electronics. With consumer electronics, things like a thrown toilet, like a toilet camera, where it's gonna inspect your fecal matter and give you feedback on that. Like, I would have never thought, but people are doing it right? I mean, it's crazy to me, like, oh, wow, that's an informal product. I'm not working on it, but it's just like, crazy stuff like that. I just love, like, the wacky. The stuff that people come up with in the hardware realm. It's just such an eclectic group of people. And I just enjoy working on there's a lot of technicality to it, like trying to package these circuit boards and things and trying to execute a vision of either an industrial designer or the founder itself. It's just a fun process to try and execute on that. And it's always challenging. It's hard bringing a physical product to the market, so I enjoy that challenge as well.
Aaron Moncur:What do you consider your bread and butter? Is it industrial design, just hardcore mechanical engineering, electronics design, or kind of a mix of everything? Yeah,
Ryan Stevenson:I'm more of a generalist, but if I had to, like, pick one niche, I'm not industrial designer, but I like to take industrial designs or even make them myself with no respect, without respect to industrial diners. So I'm trying not to broach into that field. But like, I like doing a lot of hardcore surfacing, getting complex surfaces and industrial designs and trying to package electronics and that. So I think bridging that gap between industrial design, getting actual products out into the field is kind of my specialty, if you will, whether that be from prototype side, and then eventually having different segments where you kind of scale up to commercialization. I think it's, I think it's challenging to do, because you get, kind of, sometimes you get this thing where gesture designer makes something and I just throw it over the fence. I think that's the term they use, and that could be a real challenge, because not designed for manufacturing. So I have to go back and say, like, hey, either fix these surfaces, or I go rebuild it and make it manufacturable for the specific manufacturing method. So it's fun challenge, for sure,
Aaron Moncur:and what, what CAD system are you using? I'm currently using SolidWorks. Okay, all right, so I came across something, I don't know as a post or something where you called yourself a curvature comb enthusiast. Yes, this is really getting into the weeds a bit, but let's dive in. Yeah, what is the curvature comb? I mean, this is a good segue, talking about industrial design and surfacing, but tell us a little bit about why the curvature comb enthusiast, yeah.
Ryan Stevenson:So let's go with it. Back to what a curvature comb is. A curvature comb is essentially the you could, this could be either for a spline or a curve or a surface itself. But curvature comes essentially like a measure of the curvature of the surface, basically. So it's, it's non scalar, like it can, you can change the scale of it. If you go to that curvature comb tool installer works, you click on surface, you'll see a bunch of things sticking out normal to the surface, and the further they stick out, the more curved your surface is. So what that really is is a useful visual tool to tell you if there's a breaks in your surface or deviations in the surface, but also kind of the flow of your surface. Now very, not a very concrete way to define that or objective, but it's if you see the curvature cones are going across your surface, you can kind of get an idea of a flow of your surface and the geometry of it, or dips in the surface and other weird aberrations that you kind of have to be on the lookout for. You're trying to, usually make some smooth, highly manufacturable surface that goes into a tool for an injection mold, for instance. So, yeah, that the short version, long version, yeah, I
Aaron Moncur:don't know, yeah, do you do a lot of surface modeling? I
Ryan Stevenson:do, yeah, a lot of the stuff I do, a lot of consumer electronics have complex shapes. So either have to build the surfaces yourself, or to get something from an industrial designer, you kind of need to know what to do with them. So that could be a lot of offsetting the surfaces, trying to thicken them, for instance, and then packaging things inside. So, yeah, I do quite a bit of surfacing for the projects I'm on.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, surfacing is kind of its own beast, right? It's like this whole niche itself within CAD design. Do you primarily or exclusively use SolidWorks for your surfacing? I know there's some like, plugins out there and just, you know, different CAD systems all together, like Rhino or things like that, where I've never used them, but I guess I understand that they're much more powerful for complex surfacing. But where do you typically live for surfacing? Is it all in SolidWorks? It's
Ryan Stevenson:all in SolidWorks right now, you can use other tools, like Rhino, for instance, but the problem you're going to find is, if you go and use something like a rhino, there's a plugin called grasshopper for Rhino, which gets around this, but you need a NURBS surface eventually. And that's where SolidWorks and CAD programs like Creo or NX, those are parametric programs. They have NURBS, non uniform, rational peace lies what nerf stands for. If you go into a rhino or like a ZBrush, or any of those programs that are going to spit you out a mesh surface, which is not useful for manufacturing and making step files. You can make you can three print it. You can turn into an STL and print it. But when the boots hit the ground, you need an herb surface, and you need those type of parametric files to be able to manufacture it. So to answer your question, I'm primarily in SolidWorks. I have used onshape in the past, and I've used NX before, but my own freelance setup, I'm using SolidWorks.
Aaron Moncur:Nice. All right. I'm going to take a real short break here and share with everyone that the being an engineer podcast is brought to you by pipeline design and engineering, where we don't design pipelines. But we do help companies develop advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R and D services. You can learn more at Team pipeline.us. The podcast is also sponsored by the wave, an online platform of free tools, education and community for engineers learn more at the wave. Dot engineer, all right, so we're speaking with Ryan Stevenson today. Ryan, I imagine that there are engineers listening to this right now who are super interested in doing their own thing. You know, trying the like the freelance lifestyle. What? What advice or pro tips can you share with them?
Ryan Stevenson:Stay connected to your former co workers. I'm assuming, if you made friends or have friends at former places, just stay in touch. Like we're so connected these days, but I find even myself being distant from former friends and things like that. And I was just reflecting on like, I don't know why it's so easy just to send a text. Send a text. Stay in touch with your friends. Stay in touch with your former co workers, because 100% of the work I've gotten has been through former co workers. Connections of former co workers, friends of friends, etc. That's the best, best advice I could say, is stay in touch with people you know and the people you've worked with, because they're going to vet for you. They're going to vouch for you too, if you've done quality work. So that's that's your team, right? There is people you've met worked with in the past.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, that's really good advice. How about working with inventors, individuals who don't necessarily understand the engineering process or the product development process. I mean, if you're working at a product company, whether it's, you know, Apple or building locomotives, you're part of an engineering team, you all kind of get it right, like you've been through the same things. You know the process, you know how it goes. But for sure, I found what back 16 years ago, when I started pipeline, and it was just me and I was working with a lot of inventors. It's different. Working with with people who have never gone through that engineering product development process before. Any, any stories that you can share. Of course, we don't want to, like, you know, out any people or your customers or things like that, but any, any stories you can share where you had, I don't know, interesting educational experience. Working with someone who just had never been through that process before, and and what did you do to help them walk through that that process successfully?
Ryan Stevenson:Yeah, I think it's just a process of education, honestly, trying to educate your clients on the risks involved with bringing their product to market. And I find that one of the biggest things that there's sort of a gap between my expectations and theirs is usually on something like schedule or timeline. How long is this actually going to take to make a product? Because they have, you know, some sort of thing they've packed up in their garage, and they're like, Yeah, I want to be pulling tools off, pulling products off of injection will pull in three months. And it's like, well, we got a there's a lot of work to be done before we even get close to that. Think, think years, you know, or something like that, in your in your timeline here. So it's just a process of education. You're really just trying to educate, from a non judgmental standpoint, your clients on the realities of this. And that's all you can do really. I mean, it's it's up to them to be able or to want to accept that reality or whatever. All I can do is just try my best to educate them and be open minded about their concerns and things like that. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:yeah. We had an experience recently, actually, with an inventor who brought a product to us to develop, and we were going through just kind of conceptual design stages, and we'd kind of come towards the end of that concept design phase, and everything we'd heard from the customer was, yep, this is great. I love it. Everything looks good. In fact, we even had a call, like a web meeting with the inventor and some other people. And on that call, I because I know that this can happen. After working with inventors for a long time, I explicitly asked this individual, hey, does this align this design align with what you expected? Does? Did you feel like this is going to fulfill the needs that your intentions for this project, this product, and the individual, our customer, said, Yeah, yep, this is exactly what I hoped to see. This is right, right along the line, the right lines. And so say, okay, great, you know, we we moved on. Few days later, we get an email, and the email basically said, we're really concerned with the direction that you're going. We don't think you understand what the product needs to do, the requirements and all this stuff. And I was like, oh, man, I thought we were all on the same page. I like, even explicitly asked that question and and I got the answer that I hoped to get, but and now customer is singing a different tune altogether. So I said, totally understand. Why don't we get together and. Person and talk through this. And so we did that, and customer came in. Could tell that like he wasn't super happy in the beginning. He was a little disgruntled, maybe, but we talked over it in person, and as we pointed things out that I think we just couldn't do, like over a web call, he got it, and by the end, he's like, Okay, I understand. Yep, you guys are on the right track. Everything's good. Let's, let's keep going. And even though I've been doing this for a long time, that was, that was an educational experience for me. And I just realized, man, some people just at no fault of their own just because they don't have this background and experience, they haven't been through this process, they just don't they don't really see it in their minds, you know. And being together in person, and just like pointing things out in person, there's some kind of magic there that unlocks understanding for folks who just haven't been through that process before. So that's one of the things I've found that that's super helpful when working with people who just don't have the engineering background.
Ryan Stevenson:Absolutely. Yeah, communication is one of the biggest challenges, easily, by far. And I find too, when you're doing things like design reviews just over the computer, if I have CAD pulled up and I have some certain section of my CAD that's kind of hacked together, not I'm trying to show them this part of the CAD, be like, Okay, this for this the scope of what we're talking about. But there's this area over here I haven't quite finished yet. Quite finished yet. I don't even mention this other area or anything like that. We're just talking about this. And then they're like, it's like, What's going on over here and all this stuff. And it's just like, you just have to be so careful with like, the things you're trying to communicate. And it's like, oh, like, Yep, yeah, I know what you're I know I see your concern, but it's like, it's not even close to getting done yet. So just we'll get there. Just, yeah, things like
Aaron Moncur:that. So I know exactly what you mean, yeah. And they'll fixate on that, you know Well, but, but why does it look like that? It was not ready yet, but, but why does it look like it does? Yeah, it's not ready yet. Yeah, yeah. I know exactly what you're saying. I want to go back to your, your your ish hiatus and just taking some time as a break. What did you hope to learn or experience during that time? Or did you not have much of a plan? You're just like, man, I've been working really hard for a while. It's time for a break and just chill out a bit and see what happens.
Ryan Stevenson:Yeah, I think it was a bit of both. Honestly, when I left Apple, and I had mentioned this on the last day to my friends I worked with that I was hoping to have the mental capacity to kind of see where life takes me, of sorts, like, Where does my mind take me? What am I interested in? Not that I wasn't interested in my work, but when you work in such an intense environment for so long, and 40 hours a week, plus for any job, it's a lot, you know, a lot of your mental capacity is taken up. And then you go home, if you have kids, you got that whole thing taken up your mental capacity. It's just not a lot of space to kind of explore where your mind wants to go. And I was kind of really looking forward to that, taking that time off, and that's what I did. I mean, I spent a lot of time with my daughter. I I daughter. I did things that are things that allowed me to think like that, and that involves, like mountain sports, usually like mountain biking or kayaking, things like that. So it just allowed me that capacity to kind of let my mind see where it takes me. And that led me down reading a bunch of different books, you know, subjects I was just interested in, but never had the time to read about, or even things like trading, which I had kind of dabbled in for the last several years just on the side. But it allowed me to explore that sort of business, if you will, even though it didn't end up being fruitful, that's okay. I am grateful for the experience to be able to take that time to explore it. So yeah, it just, it just, it just gave me time to think about things I normally wouldn't have.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, did you have any any key insights during that time? Anything that that helped guide the next phase of your career?
Ryan Stevenson:It's a really good question. I think I didn't have to come back to doing engineering work. In fact, I actively thought about not coming back to doing engineering work and just exploring different fields. But I think I really focused on the things that I like to do and the things that I'm good at. There's this concept called ikigai. I don't feel familiar with it, the Japanese idea of, and I'm going to butcher this a little bit, but it's this idea that, like, you're doing something that's meaningful to you, good for the planet, in whatever sense that means, and you're good at it. And there's some other aspect of it, I can't remember, but I just kind of focused on that and thought about, what am I good at? What do I like doing? And it's not like I didn't like hardware. I think it's fun. It also provides a living for me. So that's also important, doing things by a living, right? I can't that's, that's an important fact I feel like these days, right? So I don't have a trust fund or anything like that. I gotta pay the bills. So I just kind of came back to this idea of coming back to engineering. It kind of just drew me back in. I think that's, it's one of those things where my friend, I told you this. Story of how I kind of got into freelancing. I didn't actively seek it. It just kind of grabbed me back in of sorts, and I just kind of let, I just kind of accepted that and went back into it was sort of an open mind. I think life is kind of weird in that way. It's unexpected. And just kind of not, I'm not trying to be woo woo here, but like life, you know, life is like, just takes certain ways, and you just sort of follow that path, and it just happened. Just happens. And I'm really content with being back where I am now doing engineering work,
Aaron Moncur:Amen brother, there's a quote from Steve Jobs that I have hanging on my wall in my home office. And I'm not going to get it exactly right, but it's something to the effect of you just have to trust that the dots in your life are going to line up at some point when you look back, and not everything might make sense in the moment, but at some point looking backwards, you just have to trust that things are going to line up and work out and make sense. And I have found that to be true in my own life. There's another great quote by it was one of the Beatles. I can't remember which one now, but he said, In the end, it'll be okay, and if it's not okay, it's not the end. I always tell that to be comforting.
Ryan Stevenson:Yeah, I like that one. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. I think a lot of things in my life just have been lucky circumstances, and just I've always been willing to just see where those things take me, whether risky or not, and it just let me back here, and I'm grateful for that, and we'll see where it takes me next. So you never know,
Aaron Moncur:yeah, for sure, thinking back over all the different projects you've done, whether it's been during your time as a freelancer or at Apple or building locomotives or SGW, whatever it was, Are there any that stand out that were particularly important for you, and I'll let you decide what important means whether you learned a valuable lesson. Maybe it was a colossal failure that you learned something great from, or maybe it was just like an extraordinarily fun and rewarding project or product that you worked on. But anything stand out in particular to you?
Ryan Stevenson:I think I can think of a couple examples, but the one that stands out to me, as far as meaningful to me, has to be kind of the startup with the ski pole. That company is still called Real Time adventure data. It really just was starting from nothing, just an idea in Micah's head of the ski pole with sensors in it to help dacoshi skiers navigate treacherous water, so to speak. And the first prototype was literally just a PPC pipe with like a force sensor in it and just, you know, Pelican case. And just really going through several years, several iterations of that product, over and over again, we had won some money at pitch. Was it a pitch conscious, some sort of competition where you talk about your business idea, whatever those are called these days, but it's just like we were just bootstrapping. It just everything ourselves. There's no outside helpers really trying to push this product hard. I was like a sort of nostalgic sense of pride about developing that product in particular, maybe more so than any other, because when you go to work for companies that you're usually if you're not working on an exactly new product, you're kind of put into the middle of a culture or some sort of product pipeline, or some sort of set in place manufacturing process that your next follow them, your next product that you design for that company is probably going to follow that to follow that to some degree. There's, there's, like, standard set in place with that. It was literally nothing. We didn't know what we were doing. I mean, we're just trying to figure it out, and made so many mistakes, and that's just how you learn. I think it's just try something, fail and do it again, historically, shades days. Everybody says it, but like, it really is just how life is and how it works. So, yeah, that's absolutely, that's easily the product I think of with the most nostalgia, if you will.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, that's terrific. It reminds me of some of my early projects when I started pipeline. I worked for a company for three and a half years, something like that, right out of college, doing product development, mostly for medical devices, but for some other things as well. So I had, you know, a foundation, but I wasn't very far into my career, three and a half years, and I got, I got laid off there, and this is when I had, kind of my exploration into different things. And do I even want to do engineering anymore? And I explored, you know, photography and web design anyway. Ultimately, I came back, or continued doing engineering, and I remember having pretty severe imposter syndrome, you know, like, who am I to be telling these people how to design their product with only three and a half years of real world experience? I don't know what I'm doing. I mean, I know a little bit what I'm doing, but not I'm not a professional. I'm not an expert here, even though, in some areas, I was actually pretty good looking back on it. But I had a conversation with an older gentleman who he wasn't an engineer at all. He was kind of a, I don't know, marketing business type guy, and I was asking him, how did you. Start out, you know, because he'd been doing his own thing for a long time. And he said, fake it till you make it. Just fake it till you make it. And I thought, huh, wow, this guy, like, he's really successful now. And that's, that's his advice, fake it till you make it. So I thought, Okay, I'll just keep going and trust that things will work out. And you know what they did? I learned a lot. I made a lot of mistakes. But, you know, you you live and you learn, and eventually you get to a point where you actually do know what you're doing,
Ryan Stevenson:yeah, for sure, yeah, we're all human. I mean, it's just, we're gonna make mistakes, and that's okay. I think, I think I've gotten more okay with that as the years have gone on, just, I still suffer from, like, some degree of imposter syndrome to a degree, even when you asked me to come on this podcast, I was like, wait, you want to be you want to interview me? You just interviewed Sam, who I home and who I work with quite a bit. And it's just like, Sam, you know, build something really successful, like informal, it's really cool. And I'm just like, freelancer. So it's, it still never goes away for a lot of people, and that's okay, but the process is still the same. Just keep trying and failing and do it again, figure it out.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, there's a professor at I think it's Harvard, maybe Stanford. I think it's Harvard, and he's done research into imposter syndrome. And I just watched this video on YouTube. It was like a four or five minute video. I posted something on LinkedIn a few months ago, and I basically talked about that. I was like, I still, to this day, feel imposter syndrome in certain contexts and and someone sent me this video, and I watched it, I was like, Oh, that's really cool. Anyway, this guy talks about all the research that he's done into imposter syndrome, and, long story short, what what he's learned over however long he's been researching this topic, is that the the people who don't have imposter syndrome and are extraordinarily confident in their abilities, generally speaking, are actually not that competent. They're they're not anywhere near as good as they think they are. Yeah, and the people who who struggle with imposter syndrome are typically pretty driven, successful, capable people. So it was a really interesting experience watching that video. And I mean, this guy has pretty good what's the word I'm looking for here? Social proof. I guess just the fact that he's a professor at Harvard. At Harvard, he's been studying this topic for a long time, and this is like his concrete, legitimate, apparently, data that he's learned. So anyway, that I thought that was pretty, pretty neat, that if you have imposter syndrome, it's actually probably a good sign for you.
Ryan Stevenson:Totally Yeah. Shows a driven individual sorts.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, right. If you were to, you know, rewind the clock 10 years back to when Ryan was just starting out in his career. What advice would you give 10 years ago, Ryan? That that you know now, that you wish you knew back then?
Ryan Stevenson:Man, that's a really good question. I think I sometimes cringe at my younger self, as far as I'm not like an outwardly arrogant person, but I felt like I just had a sense of arrogance about me for no particular reason, outwardly to other people, but maybe it's just how I grew up, or something like that, but just stay humble. You know, just stay humble. That's probably the best advice I would give. And just keep following your instincts. I see, I feel like a lot of my success is not because of things I've actively done, per se, like I've been in the right situation at the right time, and I think that's partially what I have allowed myself to be like. You know, you put yourself in favorable situations because your work, etc. I mean, that's the old what's adage about luck or something, right? But I would say keep taking risks, like, follow your instinct, and that's that's always worked for me, for better or worse, and I feel fortunate for where I've been led. So I don't know if that quite answers your question as far as, like, What advice would I give but stay humble and keep doing what you're doing, and don't get discouraged. You know, it's so easy to get discouraged these days. I think, especially with the internet being what it is these days, it's really easy to just get, like, the comparison, going back to sort of imposter germ, the comparison is the thief of joy adage is very true. I think it's more true than ever, but yeah, just keep going.
Aaron Moncur:I love that advice. Stay humble. I mean that right there is just foundational life lesson type advice right there. Stay humble. Shucks. I had. Uh, something I was going to bring up, and now I can't remember what it was. Well, it'll come back to me. In the meantime, I've got one more question for you, and then we'll, we'll wrap things up here. What is one thing that you've done to accelerate the speed of engineering?
Ryan Stevenson:Yeah, that's a really good one. We kind of been talking about sale early and often. I think that applies to prototyping for sure. Just sketch things, three different things, whatever is the best way you can de risk a product or figure out something you're trying to find out about a product. Do it? It doesn't have to be the whole product. Everything has to be sexy or catted up or anything like that. Just figure out what you're trying to figure out. Prototype it and use those results for the next iteration, I think specifically with speed. One thing I've been using a lot lately is chat, GPT, essentially llms. They're just like a super Google for all kinds of random stuff that I have questions about, even things like draft on a parting or draft on a surface for injection molding with this particular resin that I'm looking to use. Like, what are the recommendations? And of course, you have to, like, double check this, of course, but I used it the other day to figure out kind of down select on some VHB tapes I was interested in. It's just an incredible tool that even a couple years ago wasn't around. It's like a super Google it's so helpful for finding answers to the most esoteric questions you could possibly think of in engineering, because a lot of things are just like, they're not, they're not easy to find. Like, if I wanted to, yeah, I could go to 3m catalog, which is like, 10,000 pages, and try to find a bhp tape. Or I can just go to chat GPT, and it can help me down select really quickly, like, at least, like, a subset of the specific tapes I'm looking for. This can apply to things like pogo pins, even for PCBs, etc. I mean, the the ability to get that information so quickly is pretty incredible and fairly new in this, in the grand scheme of information transfer, if you will.
Aaron Moncur:It's amazing. Yeah, I use it daily heavily. Daily, my days are mostly spent, not so much on engineering anymore. Mostly what I work on now is like marketing and business development and sales and things like that. And just the other day I was, I was experimenting with the the new ish agent mode in chat GPT, where it'll go off and, like, actually do things for you. And I had it, I was, I was looking for additional leads here in Arizona that might be a good fit for for my company pipeline. And so I just had a chat GPT agent go off. I said, go off and find, like, 100 companies here locally that that I don't know of. And I gave it a list of companies that we already know and work with here locally. And it went off, and it built this spreadsheet of, yeah, sure enough, 100 companies that I didn't even know were here in the Phoenix Valley. And it gave me the website for them and a short description of what they do and why chat GPT thought it would be a good fit for for my company. It was amazing, you know. I mean, I probably would have paid someone like, 1000s of dollars to do that in the past, and now chat. GPT, is that does it for free, for, you know, 30 minutes.
Ryan Stevenson:Yeah, it's incredible. You can do just basically anything with me. You can put in data to it. It helps, like, organize and spit it out, find correlations, whatever. I mean, speaking of, like, sales, things. Like, I even uploaded my LinkedIn, so, like, basically polish this, whatever the wording I used, and just comes back with all these recommendations and things. And I think people are starting to catch on, if you like, use too much of the chat, GPT language, if you will, and like your posts on LinkedIn, or whatever, people kind of catch on. But it's, I use it as, just like a reference and just like, really handy reference. Just handy reference, just to even, like, continue the like workflow, if you will, of like, trying to write out copy or whatever it may be. It's just such a useful tool for pretty much anything. Yes, insane, yep,
Aaron Moncur:going along, what you were saying about people catching on to if you're using chat, GPT too much. There's some telltale signs that I feel like we, I don't know. There's almost an aversion to it. I don't know why exactly. Maybe because we, I don't know. It just doesn't seem fair that you're not doing the work, you're you're outsourcing it to some AI chat bot and and then just pasting it. And I don't know exactly what the reason is. That gets into some kind of psychology, I guess there. But I think there is a little bit of an aversion to like, if someone if it's really clear that you're just using chat GPT to do the work, a couple of telltale signs that whenever I'm using something from chat GPT, I always remove because it always does this. Now that I'm saying that, I realized I could probably just tell it don't do these things when I'm asking it for something, but bolding words like it always does that and and I just, I think it looks kind of weird, and then using too many or any, like little emojis in there, right? Yeah, I always take all those things out, because, to me, that's just like, oh yeah, obviously this was done in AI, and who knows if Aaron even thought about this before. We're just throwing it in there. So, yeah, what tips to
Ryan Stevenson:I use it to think of like posts, for instance, for the hardware meetup, because I'm not like a copywriter, but it always spits out, like 100 rocket emojis and things like that. First, you know, there's like the robot emoji, the lightning bolt, the gear, the rocket. Yeah, it's always spitting those out whenever it tries to come up with a post. And that's an interesting point about human aversion to, I guess the AI programs doing what they do that's interesting. Never really reflected on that before, but you're definitely right. Like, I find it myself doing it too, for no particular reason. Maybe there's something deep in our neocortex, or something like that that says, like, wait a minute, a human did not make this that is somehow against being manipulated. Yeah, sort of Yeah. It's like, against the law, the nature or something we are supposed to be connecting as humans, having some computer right for us or something, I don't know, but yeah, it's out there for doing that. More, that's pretty
Aaron Moncur:interesting that you bring it up, all right? Ryan, well, this has been great. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Obviously, you're a very bright guy, lots of great experience, and I hope you have just all the success in the world with continuing your your freelance endeavors. Anything else that, that, that you want to touch on before we wrap things up here.
Ryan Stevenson:Gosh, anything I want to touch on, I can't think of anything that comes to mind. No, I'm just, I'm really grateful for you rich out and allowing me to be on the podcast. So thank you, Aaron. I'll be going down to PDX next week. Shameless plug for Aaron here and all you do. So thanks for doing that. He did not ask me to say that. So I'm excited to get down meet you in person. Also, I'm a big fan of continuing education. So I'm excited to get down there and learn some new stuff. Fantastic.
Aaron Moncur:Provide more value. Thank you. Awesome. How can, how can people get in touch with you?
Ryan Stevenson:Easiest way is LinkedIn. You'll see the icon of me with my long, flowing hair. That's probably easiest way you can reach out via my email. It's kind of a mouthful. It's calculating infinity llc@gmail.com funny story I had originally made that. That's my LLC name here in Idaho. I originally made that because I was doing trading, and I had this whole idea about, like, trying to make a bunch of money with that, and it just kind of popped in my head. But anyway, if you wish to reach me out, reach out to me via email. That's my email, but yeah, maintenance, the easiest. Awesome.
Aaron Moncur:All right, Ryan, thanks again. I really appreciate you sharing your background insight and all your wisdom with
Ryan Stevenson:us. Yeah. Thank you very much, Aaron, thanks for
Aaron Moncur:having me on. I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R and D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the wave. Dot engineer, thank you for listening. You.
