In Review: A Strange Time • Brady Salz

Make up the mind to find your motion.

This is not the review one, but it is the wrap up one. The last couple of years have been pretty damn strange, haven't they? Sometimes it feels like summarizing a year is impossible, but that seems trivial compared to the daunting task of the previous two. Why is that? Is a sum larger than it's parts? Am I afraid of recency bias and working harder to remember things that I can't? Are the locks on buried ideas proving effective? Did you miss my flourish for dramatism?

I think this post is going to be mostly for me, unlike previous wrap-ups, which have worked pretty hard to make the things I loved accessible to you. Maybe this one will do that, but I doubt it. Instead, I think we'll talk about growth.

What Happened

January 2020 - March 2020 almost doesn't count as part of this post. If you want to know how I felt during that, head on over to the last roundup. Looking through my photos, I see parties, friends, and good times. I haven't lost any of those, but I want them all back nonetheless. It's not the same, and we did normalize it.

At the end of March 2020, I was still settling in to my new job as a manager. The story of the next two years is that I could never get both my feet into that world, but I had a good shot for the first three months. In March, the world changed. I have to give credit for my bosses and Twitter follows for correctly predicing TEOTWAWKI¹ as an event, but their angle was slightly off. It wasn't the end of the total world, as they likely had predicted, but instead it was something closer to the end of the social world. We kept our faces brave (always) and our mics on (usually) and our videos backlit (rarely), but the reality is that we all had to face our own demons in this year.

In this year, much like many years, I chose my demons. And to to the surprise of exactly zero people, I doubled down on Astranis to plow through the constant wall it happily through up. I signed up to this job to design and build a satellite, and by god I did it in the last two years. In order of ease:

Making a circuit <– Started here
Making it fit in a box
Making it work over temperature
Making it still work while integrated
Making a circuit again, but for real
Making it still work over temperature
Making it still work while integrated
Making it all actually work over temperature while integrated <– Ended here

You just don't get stories like the the ones I was able to witness over the last two years. People got shoved in hard corners, and they masked up and pushed through. No one knew what was going on? Someone figured it out. Something broke? Try and fix it, then find another solution. Sometimes I think we were born with magical springs in our knees. We got hit hard, but when Newton wrote his laws, he didn't know shit about us. We didn't just go down and come back up. We came back up faster than we had any right to, accelerating our faces into the next punch. We did it time and time again.

I just feel so fortunate for being able to have my rock during these hard times: GEOSat-1. No matter how bad it got (and it got bad), I knew I could look at that thing and figure out some problem to solve. You left more than a couple scars, but man, I'm not sure what I would've done without you.

Resolutions

I Want To Build A Factory

People hate factories these days. Blatant pyramids to capitalism – they remove all the individual from the scene. They take humans and turn them into processes, abstracting every single personal touch from it. Replaceable cogs and gears constantly grinding forward, eating the soul and coughing out black smog. In writing this, I hear their scorn: “Et tu Brady? Where is the kid who attended high school Amnesty International? Buried in a mine you force those children to dig out?"

I reject the lazy conclusion. A factory is evil? No, a dependency is evil. What's a dependency? It's a human touch. It's an undocumented process. It's a “only they know how to do it, damn”. It's a hard conversation with someone about what you're asking them to do this weekend, and one with a weak justification, and one you have already repeated twice. It's a feeble excuse that exponentially grows, until one day you're just not invited. I don't have the numbers on hand, but you can count them on one of yours – I didn't get out a lot in the past two years.

I want to fix that. I want to make a place where can take vacation and worry about nothing. I want to make a system that means your holidays aren't dictated by the ever denying Gantt chart. I want to remove those conversations.

I Want To Prove I Still Have It

I spent six years in college becoming as good as I could get at circuit design. I proved that for two years at Astranis, and then it's slowly de-accelerated. It's not the dying of the light, but I choose to rage nonetheless. There's nearly zero things at work that I don't understand circuits wise, and I'm determined to keep it that way. I am greedy and I don't want to be one-upped.

My ultimate goal is to get some silicon out as part of the OpenMPW projects. They've already done four, and I don't have much more than a couple Verilog sims and I-V plots from their PDK. I want to do this so badly: as an expression of creative output, as a notch on the belt, as a way to give back to a community with what I have fortunately received, and most of all, as a reassurance to myself.

I Want To Feel Comfortable

Black Friday is the post I always go back to. I was so, so proud of getting root-causing and unlocking that terror in my life. And this year, I fucking beat it. Last post celebrated acceleating two years. But this year, I'm celebrating skipping ahead eight more. It's done. It's fucking done.

But I still have that anxiety over the constant refreshes. Don't get me wrong - the burden is gone, and now it's just wondering if my ride is going at top speed, but I have more checks than I need. I shouldn't have to worry about this at all anymore, and this year, I'm going to stop doing so.

Some Pictures

My favorite section. No order, no preference. More than 10 but less than 20, because we're covering a couple years.

The End Of The World As We Know It, as they say ↩︎