On the threshold of a career

I have often been asked about how I got into Engineering. I got a serious reminder of it on 23 November 2011 when I went to see The Moody Blues in concert in St Kilda.

The Moody Blues - Live in St. Kilda 2011

I had started a science degree at Deakin University in Waurn Ponds, Geelong, and stopped after the first year because I realised I didn’t have a good reason for being there. I had always liked science but I had no idea what I wanted to do for a career.

Isn’t life strange

One thing that did happen that year was that a fellow student introduced me to a music group I had never heard of. This was The Moody Blues. I was hooked on the first listen. They sang songs about the meaning of life and communicated with such skill that I wanted to able to do the same. So I took up guitar and started teaching myself how to play.

At the end of that year I decided not to go back for second year of science and took a year off. I worked a couple of mundane jobs, move from Geelong to South Melbourne and joined a pub band to try my hand at music. We were no comparison to The Moody Blues but something very important happened. I found that I loved working with the equipment and thought it would be really cool to be able to design my own guitar effects, amplifiers and PA equipment. Music Electronics was the career for me.

I had no idea what to study so I went back to Deakin University and asked them. They said that I should do a degree in Electrical Engineering majoring in Electronics. So that is what I did for the next 4 years. This time I had a reason to be there and it showed in my academic results when I graduated with a First Class Honours degree and a grade average of a High Distinction. I also started designing music equipment during my career and even before graduating had equipment installed in recording studies and sold to professional musicians.

So that is how I got started in Electronics and why Analogue Electronics is one of my technical specialties.

Lovely to see you again my friend

So back to the concert.

The Moody Blues - Live in St. Kilda 2011

Wow. The Moody Blues were founded in 1963 and the main lineup dates from 1967 where they released the first concept album. That’s right, they beat the Beatles to it. The album was Days of Future Past. Of that lineup, 3 are still touring: Justin Hayward, John Lodge and Graeme Edge. Graeme Edge turned 70 earlier this year. And they still rock. That’s what finding the right career does for you. Passion and perseverance for the long haul. It is one of the best concerts I have ever been to.

And again I am grateful for the inspiration they were to me and for the career in Electronics that came from that.

Some of you may have noticed that the headings are all based on albums or songs by The Moody Blues.

New Horizons

I still play guitar and now also produce music. So as an example, here is a piece I recently produced trying to capture the journey from uncertainty into hope using music only. It is titled “Finding Hope“. Enjoy.

Finding Hope -Ray Keefe

Finding Hope – © Ray Keefe Right click to save or click to listen in the browser.

Successful Endeavours specialise in Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development. Ray Keefe has developed market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd

Exponential Entrepreneur

In 2010 I was pleasantly surprised to receive an Exponential Entrepreneur of the Year award from our Business Mentor Dr Marc Dussault, The Exponential Growth Strategist of Exponential Programs. Only 5 awards were given out in 2010.

Exponential Entrepreneur 2011 Ray Keefe

A year has gone by and I was surprised and very pleased to be awarded an Exponential Entrepreneur of the Year award for 2011. This time only 3 awards were given out and this was the only one in Victoria.

If you are wondering why I am looking more casual, it is because we were at a Business Blogging for Sales Lead Generation event run by Marc so I had no idea this was going to happen. And here I am 24 hours later blogging about it.

Successful Endeavours’ Team

This award was only possible because of the great team we have at Successful Endeavours. My thanks go to Junette Keefe and Arend Carter for their support and business excellence during 2011. So far 2011 has seen 2 new awards and 2 finalist positions for either myself or Successful Endeavours. And it isn’t over yet.

Exponential Entrepreneur 2011

All this comes only 2 days before we find out if Successful Endeavours is also taking home an award in the 2011 Casey Business Awards. If you hadn’t caught up with it, we are finalists for Manufacturer of the Year in the City of Casey Business Awards for 2011.

Ray Keefe: Exponential Entrepreneur 2011

I’ll be posting again soon.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd

I recently went through the process of applying for Senior Engineer status with IEEE. It is something I should have done years ago and I was prompted by the Victorian section of the IEEE. 

It turned out to be much harder than I had anticipated and I wasn’t surprised when the letter announcing I had been successful stated that less than 8% of IEEE members achieve this level of professional recognition. They did send me a very nice plaque which is now hanging on the wall in our office.

Ray Keefe IEEE Senior Engineer Plaque

The process required me to get 3 sponsors who would put me forward for nomination. They all had to be at or above the level of IEEE Senior Engineer. I also had to apply online to IEEE and post a wide range of details about my education, career and achievements.

I am very grateful to the support of Paul Kubik of the IEEE Victorian Section and my 3 sponsors.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

I recently met up with Clint Steele who is a Senior Lecturer in Engineering at Swinburne University and also heads up the Ingeneers Network which is intended to provide practical and networking support for Engineers.  Clint brought a video along and asked me a few questions.  These were:

• How did you gain employment after graduation?
• What is the most important thing you have learnt about the technical practice of engineering?
• What is the most important thing you have learnt about the professional practice of engineering?
• What is the most important thing you have learnt about advancing your career?

You can watch the interview here which he titled “How to be a successful engineer“. 

 Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Engineers do have a sense of humour

Engineers might seem terribly serious about their work, but Engineers laugh too.  And of course, what makes them laugh is as unique as the work they do. The classic Dilbert series of cartoons by Scott Adams are a case in point.

This first example of Engineering Humour is is a classic piece of Dilbert humour titled “The Knack”

In a recent blog post on Embedded Software Testing I also shared one of the jokes that looks at the way different Engineering Disciplines go about looking for faults or problem solving.  It goes like this:

There are 3 Engineers in a car going for a drive. The first is a Mechanical Engineer, the second an Electronics Engineer and the third is a Software Engineer. Fortunately the Mechanical Engineer is driving because the brakes fail and they are going downhill.  The Mechanical Engineer eventually brings the car safely to a halt and gets out to examine the hydraulic systems.  The Electronics Engineer gets out and checks and body computer, ABS system and the power train CAN bus.  The Software Engineer stays in the car and when queried about it says that they should all just get back in the car and see if it happens again!

And another of my favourite pieces of Engineering Humour is this joke:

The optimist says, “The glass is half full”.
The pessimist says, “The glass is half empty”.
The Engineer says, “The glass is twice as big as it needs to be”.

And an excerpt from a classic piece of Mechanical Engineering humour with the Engineers Guide To Drinks.

Engineers Guide to Drinks 2010

Anyone who subscribes to our blog will automatically get a full copy of this sent to them.  Thanks to Steve DeLosa of DeLosa Design Services for sharing this with me.

Over time I plan to add more content here but this will get the process started.  Please feel free to add any jokes or humorous stories as comments and if you know who first told any of the jokes listed here, please also let me know that so I can properly recognise the creators. As Engineers, one thing we do respect is the right be be recognised for what you do and create.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © 2010  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Squash Lessons for Engineering

The picture in today’s post comes courtesy of Dr Marc Dussault, The Exponential Growth Strategist. At his recent Exponential Business Building Bootcamp, he demonstrated how a Squash Racquet gets broken from repeated use.

Broken Squash Racquet

So what does this have to do with Engineering? Glad you asked.

First, I have to explain the demonstration. Marc showed that it takes a very large amount of force to break the Squash Racquet.  He really applied himself to the destructive task and it took a few minutes of escalating Squash Racquet abuse before it finally succumbed and broke.  Some of us in the front of the room could tell just how much it required to break the Squash Racquet. However the Squash Racket already had a crack, so Marc knew where to apply the force in order to break it.  The picture above is the final outcome.  Without the crack being obvious, it would have been almost impossible to have broken the Squash Racquet using just randomly applied force.

Marc then explained that way the Squash Racquet became cracked in the first place, was by it being consistently scraped along the wall as he retrieved the ball from shots along the wall.  Marc is an outstanding competitive squash player and currently ranks  as World # 18! So he knows his stuff when it comes to squash.  You can read more about this at his Mindset Of A Champion blog.

So if you know what to look for, you can monitor the thinning of the racquet and get an idea of when and where it might fail.  If you don’t know what to look for, then the failure will be unexpected.

Software Testing and Software Engineering

A lot of Software Testing can suffer from the same problem.  If you already know where the weakness will be and how to spot it, then finding a bug is easy.  You can set up the scenario, monitor for the symptom and confirm the failure.  Or, if you have enough resources you can go the brute force approach and just break it through the persistent use of randomly directed and escalated force of testing.  However very products are simple enough and very few companies are large enough to have that level of resource and to solve the problem this way.  So for the rest of us, the other 99.995%, a more intelligent approach is needed.

Since you don’t know where and when it will fail, it is best to remove failure causes from the beginning. This is where Software Engineering come is. Software Engineering is not just coding.  Coding is the production end of the Software Engineering process.  Software Engineering is about designing the system so you have defined the components so they are each fully testable in their own right. Then you can apply processes like Unit Testing to ensure they are fully functional as stand alone pieces of software. You can then perform Integration Testing to ensure that software added to the system correctly handles both the Execution Flow, also known as Control Flow, and Data Flow required including error and Exception Handling. The result is that you build up a fully working and correctly executing system quickly and with great confidence. It isn’t a magic bullet but it is close to it.

As was famously quipped by Edsger Dijkstra, “If Debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in”.

So if you put less bugs in, you have less debugging to do. And that saves time and removes future time bombs.  Because the chance that you find them all is zero percent. And you can’t create a system that is 100% testable by brute force means. So you have to go about it smarter.  It will save time, money and improve the business outcome now and into the future.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © 2010  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Software Testing

I recently met with an Australian Software Development company, PepperStack, and we got onto the subject of Software Testing. As someone who began their career as an Electronics Hardware Engineer, one of the things I learnt was that you have to test thoroughly to be sure everything is working as it should be. With Electronics, if you make a mistake with an Engineering Calculation you can easily destroy things. This is sometimes referred to as “letting the smoke out”. So it was good to meet with others who believe in the same level of rigorous software unit, module and system testing that we do.

Some Engineering Humour

Which reminds me of a joke I once heard:

There are 3 Engineers in a car going for a drive. The first is a Mechanical Engineer, the second an Electronics Engineer and the third is a Software Engineer. Fortunately the Mechanical Engineer is driving because the brakes fail and they are going downhill.  The Mechanical Engineer eventually brings the car safely to a halt and gets out to examine the hydraulic systems.  The Electronics Engineer gets out and checks and body computer, ABS system and the power train CAN bus.  The Software Engineer stays in the car and when queried about it says that they should all just get back in the car and see if it happens again!

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not having a go at Software Engineers. The process of finding and eliminating faults is a very important part of the development cycle and is something that needs up front thinking and not just responding to symptoms.  And the more complex or sophisticated a system is, that harder it is to fully test every possible response to every possible stimuli and after a certain point it becomes impractical to have 100% Test Coverage (every line of code has been executed through all of the possible states).  The reason this is a bigger problem with Software Development is that the flexibility of software means that it is inherently complex and it takes skill and planning to manage that complexity so it is testable.

So here is the issue. More than any other discipline, faults can be experienced by an end user of a product under a situation or scenario you could not have proactively tested against before release.  There are many potential reasons for this including:

• change of hardware or operating system environment
• new standards or protocols
• the sheer number of potential combinations of drivers, peripherals, software and users
• the product being used for a purpose it wasn’t originally designed for
• gamma ray corruption of a memory location – I am getting esoteric now but in some areas like avionics and space this is a big threat

So how do you reduce the likelihood of these problems occurring?

Improving Software Quality

With many new products having Electronics and Embedded Software and the Software Development requiring 80% of the effort, it is important to delivery it as quickly and fault free as you can. The main weapons in your Software Quality arsenal have been known about for a long time but are, in our experience, just not used.  These are:

• Architectural Design – work out how the data and execution flow will happen and how you will manage the constraints
• Functional Decomposition – divide and conquer but with an emphasis on how each module fits into the system and how the interfaces work in detail
• Error handling - who will decide what to do with response codes – again this is data and execution flow and part of the architecture. In many cases exception management is at least 50% of the project.
• Have an Integration Test Plan – some thing that proves the data and execution flow matches the architectural design.  Too often “it builds” seems to be good enough here.
• Unit Test modules – so you remove all the issues before adding them to the integration
• Do the Integration Tests before you try system testing
• Design modules so you can integrate them as shells then add functionality down the track
• Have NVM and configuration data available at the beginning of the project and not as an after thought at the end
• Have a System Test Plan and use it
• Use some of the good practices of Test Driven Development – run the tests every time you change the code
• Have a rationale for what level of Code Coverage you can accept
• Have a rationale for what level of Churn you can accept – Churn is the percentage of the lines of code that have changed in the past time period.  Usually either a week or month depending on the size of the project.
• Use automated software quality tools. For instance we use both PC-Lint and RSM to automated many software quality metrics which saves a lot of time in Code Reviews
• Use Code Reviews, also known as Software Peer Review.  It really does save time.

Next I plan to look at what you can learn about software testing from a Squash Racquet.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © 2010  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Australian Engineering Week 2010

Today begins Australian Engineering Week 2010.  You can get a full run down on all the events at Make It So which you might recognise as a tribute to the Star Trek series. 

It got me thinking about why I got started in Engineering.  It was music.  I had done 1 year of a Science degree focusing on Physics and Chemistry at Deakin University and had taken a year off because I had no idea why I was doing a degree.  So I worked a few mundane jobs and joined a pub band.  We were pretty bad.  I had only started playing guitar a year before that.  The equipment was low grade and needed a lot of maintenance and I was constantly trying to improve the PA, the mixer, the guitar and amplifier and the effects.  They were all analogue electronics in those days. It was mostly trial and error and occasionally trial and success!

What if I knew enough about Electronics to be able to improve, or even design from scratch, my own guitar effects pedals, guitar amplifiers, mixing desks and PA system?

But where would I learn that?  So I went back to Deakin University and asked them.  And they suggested Engineering.  I had mostly thought of Engineering as roads, buildings, bridges and transport so this was a new type of Engineering for me.  But I was also hooked.

Four years later with a First Class Honours Degree in Electrical Engineering I was doing just what I had set out to do.  Electronics Design was now a part of who I was, not just an area of study.   My rig was designed and built by me.  And I also doing electronics design and custom pro-audio equipment construction for recording studios and professional musicians.

So check out Australian Engineering Week 2010 and for some more insights into Engineering you can also read the blog at Engineering Education Australia.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © 2010  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Safety in High Voltage Power Distribution

My thanks to Tim Heemskerk of ABB High Voltage Division in Lilydale for this clip.  It shows how dangerous High Voltage power can be in Electric Power Transmission Systems and why ABB take so much care in how they handle High Voltage Switching, Power Factor Correction and Fault Isolation and Reclosers in systems operating at these Elevated Voltages.  Be sure to wait for the slow motion replay at the end.  I think these guys might have seen an episode or two of Myth Busters.

For those who don’t recognise them, the rectangular boxes with terminals sticking out the top are High Voltage capacitors used for Power Factor Correction in Power Distribution systems.  They have been charged to 13.8KV and hold 9675J of energy.  The pull cord is used to close the electrical circuit and the capacitor voltage is applied to the watermelon which conducts the current and the energy released causes it to explode rather spectacularly.  Not what you want happening in a real Power Distribution scenario which is why you want Engineers who know what they are doing working on both the Engineering Design and the implementation of these High Voltage Distribution systems.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © 2010  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

This week I was the recipient of an Exponential Entrepreneur of the Year award.  Last year we were received 2 awards for technical excellence when we won 2 of the 15 EDN Innovation awards handed out in Australia in 2009. 

So I was very pleased to be receiving an award recognising the business side of Successful Endeavours.  The award was presented by Dr Marc Dussault of Exponential Programs and recognises entrepreneurs and business people who have demonstrated excellence deploying exponential strategies in their business by profitably creating exceptional value for their clients in a manner that is both measurable and sustainable. The award received was in the category of Engineering Consultant and was one of only 6 handed out in 2010 and the only one in that category. 

Exponential Entrepreneur of the Year 2010 Ray Keefe receives his award from Dr Marc Dussault.

You can read more about the awards at Exponential Programs Entrepreneur of the Year Awards page. 

The main reason for this post is to touch on the most significant aspect of this award for me. I once said that as a Business Owner I made a pretty good Engineer.  The past 18 months has a seen a transition away from that to the point now where I can say that I am an Entrepreneur who is also an Engineer.  Engineering is a Profession and so it isn’t something that suddenly stops being relevant.  Our education and mindset is all based on practical problem solving through the use of technology while balancing performance, risk and cost.  And we apply this skillset and mindset to most aspects of our lives, even when it isn’t the only way to go about it.  So I am very pleased to be making this transition.  Not only is our business better for it but our clients are as well. 

And I also thank our clients for the trust they have placed in us to deliver Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development for their next generation of market leading products, the vast majority of which are still made in Australia at a profit. 

Here is a picture of the Exponential Entrepreneur of the Year award certificate. 

Exponential Entrepreneur of the Year Certificate

 The initial nomination was published on PRWeb at 2010 Exponential Entrepreneur Award Winners Announced. 

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © 2010  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.