Engineer Your Success: Navigating Paths in Engineering & Technology w/ Circuit Bread

This webinar covers two key discussion points, exploring how to break into the engineering sector from both the technical and non-technical perspectives. Joshua Bishop and Laren Dubkowski share insights on their experiences and perspectives. The conversation is wide-ranging, from working with professors to student certifications and technical vs. non-technical communication styles.

Key Highlights 

• Intro
• The Importance of a Strong Education
• Importance of Clear Communication
• Technical & Non-Technical Collaboration in the Work World
• Utilizing Our Strengths to Reach the Next Generation
• Where Young Engineers Do Research
• Sand to Gaming: A Case Study  
• Q&A

Links and Resources

• Watch the recent episodes of Ctrl + Listen Podcast on the Octopart Youtube Channel
• Follow Octopart on LinkedIn
• Visit The Pulse, your one-stop resource for all things supply chain and electronics component
• Visit CircuitBread.com 
• Connect with James Sweetlove on LinkedIn

Transcript: 

James Sweetlove: 
Hey everyone, thank you for tuning in. This is James from Octopart, welcome to the next installment of the webinar series. Today, we have two guests from Circuit Bread, an Octopart partner. This is Engineering Your Success Navigating Paths in Engineering and Technology. Basically, we're going to have two different discussion topics going today, both tying in together, and what we're looking at is how to break into the engineering sector both as an engineer and as a non-engineering professional. So, to start us off, we have Joshua Bishop, who is joined by Laren Dubkowski. Before we get started, I just want to let you know if you have any questions whatsoever, please feel free to ask them in the chat. We will get to them at the end of the show. Josh, thanks for joining us. I'll let you take it from here.

Joshua Bishop: 
Thanks for that introduction, James. As James mentioned, my name is Josh Bishop. I work with Circuit Bread and SwellFox, and we'll get into that in a moment. I'm over the engineering team, and my background is in electrical engineering. Laren and I, along with our partner April started up SwellFox and Circuit Bread several years ago, and April was smart enough not to join us today. She is our lead developer. She's over the development team that does all of our site development, and she is a little bit more camera shy than us, which again, I think is a good indicator of intelligence.  Laren, I'll let you introduce yourself.

Laren Dubkowski:
I'm a UX/UI designer now for SwellFox. I've been a UX/UI designer for about ten years, and before that, I worked in IT for a school district. I just wanted to shout out, too, as April can't be on the call with us, but neither can everyone on our team. We just have an amazing team of designers, videographers, content creators, and developers, and I'm going to leave out a lot of other roles, but I just wanted to recognize everybody on our team for all the great work that they do.

Joshua Bishop: 
So when we think about how you can be the most successful in an electrical engineering community as an electrical engineer, we think the best way is to have a strong educational background, to have a foundation that was built in college that you really understand the concepts. Nobody expects you to be perfect when you come out of college, nobody expects you to know how to do everything but just the ability to speak intelligently and to have problem-solving skills and to have that foundation even if there's a lot of fluff that you're still missing. Knowing your basic circuits and your basic vocabulary even is incredibly important in your first job, and that's kind of another interesting aspect of this and is one thing that Laren will be talking about more. When you get into that first job, you've been prepped to think, I'm going to be doing engineering, I'm going to be working with engineers, and while that's true, we find that most people are surprised at how much they work with non-engineers and non-technical people. So that's where it's fun to get Laren’s perspective as a non-engineer on what it's like to work with those of us who are engineers.

Laren Dubkowski:
So before working with SwellFox and before working in the electronics industry, like I said, I worked in IT for a school district. I'd say in that job role, I was a bit more on the technical side. You're used to people coming to you with questions that they don't know that they need answers to. They're putting work orders, and you're helping him solve those problems, and it feels good to be the technical person. But then, moving into the electronics industry, I remember my first few weeks on the job, the projects we were working on, not only was it the transitioning to a new, in my case, profession of being a designer. It was hard, but understanding that we're supposed to do this for these parts, these little black parts that you don't know anything about, is challenging. That's where I guess, over the course of the last ten years working in the industry, you pick up some tips, and you kind of learn how to work in that environment. It's been great working with Josh because he's an electrical engineer, and in the environment, we were in, if we were working on a project, we could just go to our engineers and say listen, decode this for me, or put this in a way that I can understand. It's important to have technical people on staff so that they can decode the whole environment. I think another part of it is learning to ask the right questions. Now in my role, I'm working with electrical engineers, I'm working with software developers, and I'm neither of those two things, and I don't understand. I understand a very surface level of that, but I think what I have learned to do is just to not give up on it and not just kind of not try. I try to understand as best as I can and then just ask the critical-thinking-type questions. A lot of times, what I found with that is that all I can ask these questions is just I'm offering a different perspective, and I think it helps in a lot of situations. One of my favorite classes in college, as a business major, was human resources. It wasn't so much for the topic as I don't want to be in human resources, but the professor was amazing, and he had the opportunity to become an executive at Heinz. He told us at the time that by the time I was offered that, I was older. It would be a ton of hours you're going to work 60-plus hours a week, and it just wasn't for me. But, one of the things that he drilled into us was all of these tough kinds of scenarios. We do labor negotiations where they set up these scenarios where neither side can win, like it really comes down to this compromise. We would talk about firing people and hiring people and all these things, and he would always say, you're going to work in a lot of difficult situations, and no matter what,  it always comes down to treating people with dignity and respect. He just hammered that into my brain. Treat people with dignity and respect, try to understand them, try to speak their language, and try to ask the right questions.  The other thing that I learned is that everybody has a specialty. I think there's kind of this misconception that because somebody has a pile of degrees or because they have a lot of years of experience, they're perceived as being really smart. I think that society may give too much credit to that. For example, if this person's good at math, they're a smarter person -  I think it's more that people have specialties and all of those specialties are valuable, especially in a team environment. One person on their own doesn't create an iPhone and distribute it and market it and all the things. You need the specialties. In a way, it reminds me of playing a video game where you're creating a character, or you're using a character that already exists in the game, the characters have these attributes. I think society tends to think, oh, this technical person is just way smarter than I am, whereas instead, I want people to think of it more in terms of their different skill sets. Josh is way better at math than I am by far, but Josh is colorblind and probably wouldn't make the best designer. He doesn't have design skills. So in this example, I have up on the screen two football players in this game one is a cornerback, and the other is a wide receiver. They just have different skills. You don't expect your quarterback to be a linebacker, it just isn’t what you need. So it's really about people coming together and working together in a team.  I think this relationship between technical and non-technical it's about coming together for a compromise and meeting in the middle. It's just as important for the non-technical person to try to understand and ask critical questions as it is for the technical person to be able to simplify things for the non-technical person. 

James Sweetlove:
So, I just had a question regarding skill sets and sort of overlap between the two. I guess as companies progress and grow, one of the key things that I know a lot of them struggle with is procurement. Obviously, that is something that ties into both sides of the engineering spectrum, so technical and non-technical, is this something that people kind of innately learn in a company as a skill, like procurement and supply chain sort of navigation, or is this something that people specialize in within organizations and which side is it fall more on? The technical side or the non-technical side?

Joshua Bishop:
Oh, that's an interesting question because I feel like in procurement, it's a little bit difficult. I imagine it is very dependent on the company itself because I imagine in some companies, the engineers say, I want this part, I want it in this quantity, I want it from this place, please go buy it for me, whereas other companies the engineer says, hey I just need a resistor it needs to be an 0603 I need 10,000 of them go find it somewhere. I don't care about the brand. If it's open-ended like that, the procurement manager is going to have to know what they're talking about first of all. They need to know what that even means to start the conversation, and then they need to be able to research and say okay, he might not have a brand preference, but I care because we need a high-quality resistor. Then on top of that, on more of the business side and the non-technical side, he has to think about logistics. For example, this place sells 10,000 of them, and that's great. You buy them, but then they're not available anymore as that was a going-out-of-business sale or something like that, so they don't provide any support, you can't go back and get 10,000 more you have to go through somewhere else, and then you have to characterize everything again. So that's a really interesting challenge because they have to kind of play both sides, and how far they lean one side to the other, I think, really depends on the environment of the company itself.

James Sweetlove: 
Great answer, thanks. Laren, what about you from a non-technical side? Is that something that you see at all in your day-to-day, or is that sort of more, as Josh was saying on that technical
side of things?

Laren Dubkowski:
I would say more on the technical side of things.

James Sweetlove: 
Great, okay, thank you.

Joshua Bishop:
I will also say just really quick, when you were talking about not being able to speak the language, as an electrical engineer, I obviously speak the language, but when I'm talking to April, we'll have a client who'll ask a question about the website, about the development side and April and her team they're very technical, it's just a different kind of technical. I don't know how many times I've just been like, April, they said this, you say this. I don't understand what's going on can you please explain? It's funny that even as a technical person when I'm outside of my technical field, I'm in the exact same spot as you are in terms of, I have to respect them for what they know, and I have to hope that they're going to be patient with me as I'm like what are you talking about here. I don't know how many times we've said, hey, could you make this tweak, expecting it to be really easy, and they're like yeah, that'll take a couple of weeks, and then other times you expect this huge change and like oh that's just a checkbox that we go in the back end and do. I was thinking as you were talking, Laren, that that's something I face all the time as well when dealing with the website development side of things because that's not my field of
expertise.  

Laren Dubkowski:
Yeah, so on our team, we have developers, designers, engineers, videographers, content writers, and everybody has to come together and work together. When we set out to work on Circuit Bread, we sat down and asked how we can best utilize our strengths as a team to reach the next generation. It's interesting Apple used to throw this slide in their presentation that had the crossroads of technology and liberal arts, and I think this idea that any tech company can 
create a device, but then ultimately that device has to be used by users, regular people. Apple would always say that they're creating these devices and creating their products at the crossroads of technology and liberal arts. I think that it speaks to how we work on it as well as how we view it. A lot of it, too, that we want to focus on is how we utilize these strengths and pull everything together to reach the next generation. There's this idea that, for some reason, even in my own head, there's this idea that millennials are going to enter the labor force. They've started a little bit, but the floodgates are going to open. I found the stat the other day that 40% of the labor force are millennials and post-millennials. The number kind of shocked me, and then I stepped back, and I was thinking, I'm a 37-year-old millennial. It's not that I've just arrived in the workforce, I've been here for a while. I think a lot of companies look at it like, we have our existing approaches, and those approaches have worked forever, and those approaches are going to continue working forever. At the same time, the younger generations expect a different experience, especially in the content creation industry. You know, now it's about YouTube and social media and everything like that more. Print media is not as common for younger generations anymore. We're excited that 70% of Circuit Bread YouTube subscribers are between the ages of 18 and 34. It's people who are getting into the industry and people who are in the industry wanting to just kind of keep their skills sharp. 

James Sweetlove:
Before you move on to the next slide, I just want to ask, with internet nativity, do you see it changing with millennials? Do you think it's different now the way people find parts or want to
purchase?

Laren Dubkowski:
That kind of goes into the next slide that I'm going to talk about, actually. We want to focus on where young engineers do research. A friend of ours, Lectrix, did this study in 2022, and it's about focusing on where young engineers do research. You know, obviously, it's modern media. It's streaming video and stuff like that, but just looking at the graph there, e-learning courses in particular, video in particular, formats like what we're doing right now, social media, ultimately at the end of the day, they might go to the distributor site or Octopart.com to find the parts, but when they're doing their research they're jumping on YouTube, they're jumping on some of these newer platforms to find out more about it. I don't know if Josh you have anything to add to that.

Joshua Bishop:
Yeah, I would almost say that those are kind of two separate parts. There's the research part in terms of trying to find the actual component that you want, and then there's the sourcing to purchase it. I think when I first started, the very first component I bought was online, and then the company started sending me these things. These books they're humongous books of all the parts that were on sale, and I got those every month, every quarter, I don't remember. I was sitting there in college thinking, what am I going to do with these? I used them as a footrest, I started piling them up under my desk, and I just put my feet on them because I never use them. That was how the older generation did it, and I'm sure there are still many engineers where that's what they prefer, and I get that. I still like reading books that are hardcover, I have my Kindle, but I'd still rather read a real book. In terms of finding parts, I think I've definitely gone more with the younger generation, and I want it to be something simple. I want to be able to compare everything as quickly as possible, so in regard to Octopart, I put in a part number, and it not only shows me where I can get that part, but it shows me all the price breakdowns at the different levels and all that. I like that sort of stuff because then, in the cases where I already know the part number, I can have something that makes the decision-making the easiest for me because all I have to do is put it in, and it all pops up on one page, and I don't have to go; now let me look at this distributor, let me look at this distributor, oh they do direct sales, things like that so I definitely do think that procurement has changed in the last 10 to 20 years. I don't want to say we've gotten lazy, but we've got to the point where we enjoy the easier aspects. Why would I do it the hard way when I am being offered a free, easy way? It just doesn't make any sense to do it the hard way. 

James Sweetlove:
Then what you were mentioning before about sort of like the initial start of the learning journey being through YouTube and that sort of thing, would you say that millennials and Gen Z have taken a different approach to how they choose which companies they want to interact with and actually look to these companies as sort of thought leaders as opposed to just, hey here's what you can provide me professionally, but they actually want to see them saying something, standing for something, believing in something, or at least putting through a message or a brand that they can connect with. Is that something you've seen a trend in recent years?

Laren Dubkowski:
Absolutely, we'll touch on a little bit later too, but I think a lot of it is being genuine. I think that's something that the younger generation values. A lot of people think, don't trick me into buying something, don't slap me in the face with an ad, I have a question, or I have a concern, or I need to do some research,  give me the answer. So I think that's part of the challenge or part of playing the game with content. Creating genuine content that people are looking for, but it has to be funded as well, so it's striking this balance between how you weave in the promotion and things like that in a natural way.

James Sweetlove:
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, Octopart launched The Pulse, which is our content center. Obviously, we try to provide a wide range of content. We have some sponsored stuff here and there, but we have a lot of stuff that we want to be genuine that people can actually come to and learn and say, oh, that was actually really interesting, that's actually applicable to my career in my daily life so, and we've seen a really positive response. I mean, I kind of think it's a step in the right direction. People kind of want to hold brands accountable; it's no longer just how much ad spend we can throw at someone until they buy something. 

Laren Dubkowski:
Absolutely yeah. I think it's playing a longer game. I think traditionally, a lot of the thinking is we put up an ad, and we see the results at the end of the month, and that's it. But I think that we started the Circuit Bread platform at zero. Zero page views, zero subscribers, and it's taken a long time. We've been at it for five years, and we have, I think, almost 76,000 subscribers on YouTube. It's definitely not something that you start and say, okay, at the end of this month, we're going to be an influencer or something like that. We still haven't arrived at that point yet, either. It just takes a long time. 

James Sweetlove:
TikTok is like a whole other beast in that space where people can blow up overnight, but it's really hard as a brand to actually market appropriately on that platform, given their standards and their best practices. 

Joshua Bishop:
You just never know, sometimes you'll hear clients say hey, we'd like to make a viral movie or viral video, and it's like, wouldn't we all? I mean, sometimes a viral video is a lot of work, and sometimes it's just somebody happened to take a video in their kitchen, and it took him 10 seconds, and then it went viral. There's a lot that goes into it. 

Laren Dubkowski:
The other thing that I'll say is that a really valuable thing that we learned is that each platform is unique in how you build it. With the site, it's about SEO and creating regular content and your domain authority and things like that, and with YouTube. What people see when they do a search result is they see a title and they see a thumbnail, and that's all the information they have to go off. Then once they click on that, you have your click-through rate, and they start watching the video, then, what YouTube looks at is how long they stay. So, I mean, that's basically telling YouTube how good the content is. So that's what I would recommend for people, too, building these platforms is looking at each one, YouTube, Facebook, website, Instagram, reading books about it, and watching YouTube videos about how each one kind of functions.

James Sweetlove:
Right well, great, thanks. I'll let you guys get back to it.

Joshua Bishop:
So right now, our goal with Circuit Bread is basically to have the core educational courses we do a lot of non-educational, but our goal is basically 75 to 80% of our content is purely educational, tutorial-type lesson coursework. We want people to be able to come to Circuit Bread, look at a video, and learn perhaps a basic introduction to control systems. They go in, and they learn about it, and they have the concept. We do some math to get them comfortable with the association between the concept and the math. Then they go to their class, and in the class, the professor says okay, you guys watched that video that I recommended. Let's talk about it now. In that class, people would be able to ask questions because that's one of the challenges with videos. You can't ask questions live. You can't say hey, what did you mean by that? We try to make the videos as clear as possible, but obviously, there are imperfections, and sometimes it'll click with one person, and it won't with the other.  After they've watched this video, they can go in, talk to their professor, ask any questions, get things clarified, and then basically, they can get homework and all those sorts of things to make sure that they truly understand the concept. That is basically our main goal, is that we can work hand in hand with professors. Not competing with them, but hand in hand with professors to teach these concepts and these mathematical principles. Then, they can go to your university and become even more familiarized or entrench that information in them by asking those questions that need to be clarified. Also, by doing homework, because actually doing homework as much as homework stinks, that really helps those concepts sink in. Even though I've talked about tutorials, we actually have other things we've created to try and help people understand exactly what's going on, so with this visual that just popped up, you can see in the top left that's a tutorial we're trying to help people understand RGB LEDs. We try to do more practical things. The funny thing is we were trying to show exactly what can happen with a decent voltage and a very low resistance, and this is not at all useful for engineers to actually learn something, but every once in a while, we need a break so the developers wanted to do some practice. Ivan, who's our development team lead and works directly with April, wanted to create this game. Stephanie, our design team lead, created this game. Anyway, that's kind of a fun side, but then we have our FAQs which are more standalone topics that people might be interested in. We have the tools that people can use to go along with what they need in order to learn. Tools to verify what they know, and I only want to mention the last thing on this because I really like it. There's the study guide.  Susie put together these study guides, and they're basically something that you can go in if you've taken the class and you just don't remember certain particulars of the class or don't remember certain equations, you can jump in, and she's got it all summarized very beautifully. I love the study guides. They're extremely well done, and I think they're incredibly helpful. That kind of is a demonstration of the different types of content that we're trying to do to help electrical engineering students succeed. We also like to do fun, higher level, not quite as technical videos, and I think this Sanda gaming video is an excellent example of it. I think this is more of a passion project for Laren, so I'll let him talk about it.

Laren Dubkowski:
Yeah, so this is one of our favorite videos. You know, when I was working in IT, I would go into the server rooms and look at the servers, look at the switchgear, and you'd see all these little blinking lights on the switchgear. You'd hear the hard drives and stuff like that, and sometimes I just look at it and think like that blinking light is somebody streaming a video or saving a file or something like that. I've always loved technology, but it can be hard to understand how some things work in kind of little segments, how does it all come together into one experience? How does our phone work? All of these little components that hundreds of companies working on components and raw materials put in. So this video we created goes through from a relatively high level how you go from literally sand and silicon to every step of that process. Ingots, cutting that into wafers, using lithography machines, how you start integrating with code to control all this stuff, and in total, the video goes from sand to how you can play a modern video game like Call of Duty on a console. Again for me, it was just so cool to see it all come together and to see, man, this is how it's actually possible. It's insane that it works, but it's amazing that it all comes together.

Joshua Bishop:
Yeah, that's a particularly fun one. I really enjoy that. I like to look at these as more of an opportunity at the top of the funnel to get people who might be interested in electrical engineering to have a better understanding of why it's really cool to be an electrical engineer and also show the variety of what you can do as an electrical engineer. You don't have to do circuit design, you don't have to do hardware design, you don't have to do semiconductors, you can do whatever you want within that and still make really cool things. Now, in the interest of time, I just want to touch on this briefly, but at the moment, Circuit Bread is not very well funded. We're in the process of monetizing it, but when we mentioned earlier about advertisements and trying to have a more genuine relationship with Friends with CircuitBread Program, with people. We never wanted Circuit Bread to just have banner ads all over the place, so we created what we call the Friends of Circuit Bread program, which basically is the opportunity for us to weave a friend into the content itself in a way that makes sense. So for example, we have a resistor manufacturer that is supporting some of our Ohm’s law-type tutorials, those more basic tutorials. In those tutorials, we mention how we use their parts. As an example, we have them integrated into the tutorial itself in a way that we hope makes more sense because, frankly, our demographics we've looked at 50% of our demographics do use ad blockers. So they don't see any ads anyway, and second, a lot of the ads that you see in places they're really out of context, so you might be learning about Ohm's law, but then you have this tutorial talking about a $30,000 oscilloscope and well, I mean you're a student trying to learn the basics you don't need a $30,000 oscilloscope. There's no real relationship. So we're trying to create some way of making it where it just is natural, and it's beneficial, and we really do see the benefits of everybody working together. So we want to create this sort of network effect in the way that we support ourselves because if we do this properly, everybody wins. Users win because they have less stress and they do better as electrical engineers. Universities win because they have a higher success rate with their electrical engineers, more people are passing, and they don't have to have as much stress because they're able to leverage the content that we've created. The Friends that are supporting us are benefiting because they're showing their brand awareness, and they're showing, hey, we're willing to support this, and they're getting that front-of-mind real estate with these upcoming engineers. Finally, it helps us because it funds us in this mission to create this content, so I do love win-win situations. Sergey is an engineer that I've been working with for almost ten years now. He still does fantastic work for us, and he knows that if it's not at least a double win, then I'm not interested. Ideally, it should be a triple or quadruple win, and in this case, we think it can be a win-win-win-win situation for everybody to be lifted up and helped together and just overall make this a better space. That is, frankly, the core of the message in terms of success, both on the engineering side and the non-engineering side. That is if you are doing your work with the intent of not only helping yourself but helping the company you're working for and the users that are utilizing the services of your company. You're going to be successful because everybody wins, and that's the best way to move forward.

James Sweetlove:
Fantastic, thank you so much for that. It was fascinating listening to that. We do have some questions for you that have been sent in by the audience, so I'm going to start with this one here. It's a bit of a longer question, but I think it's very relevant. They said, 'I'm a student, and just out of curiosity, I wanted to check. I saw some job applications, and some of the electronics engineering positions have certifications that are needed to apply, but when I talk to the recruiters of these companies, I hear that they see it as more of a bonus rather than a necessity to apply. Is it pretty common in the industry to see something like this?

Joshua Bishop:
From my perspective, yes. It goes back to what I said, when you're coming out of college, they don't expect you to know everything, and for many job applications and many job positions, they don't expect you to know everything in that case either. The certifications are a bonus. It means, okay, you're specialized in this area, but one of the things about being an electrical engineer is it's all about being able to learn and being able to grow in that area, and once you jump in, you're going to be able to add more value. Of course, that's not always the case, you may be an expert in exactly that thing and what they need, but most of the time. What I've seen is they say, hey, we want somebody interested in this and has a fairly good idea of what's going on, and then we expect them to have at least a couple of months to kind of figure out and really delve deep into that topic once they're there. So yeah, with certificates, I haven't really seen actual demand for those certificates to be needed actually to apply for the job.

James Sweetlove: 
Okay, great, thank you. The other one is, do you see millennials changing big enterprises’ way of manufacturing? How are they shifting the company culture and the method of manufacturing?

Joshua Bishop: 
I think so, yeah. Laren, did you want to address that one?

Laren Dubkowski:
I mean, I would say, from a non-technical perspective, I think that every generation is going to come into the workforce and change the way that things happen. It's kind of funny, you know, a lot of people kind of bemoan that fact like, oh man, the next generation is coming, and they're just terrible, and things are different, and things will never be the same, and it's yeah, things probably won't be the same, but that doesn't mean it's going to be worse. I think overall, we improve over time. I think younger generations come along and say, why are we doing it this way? They kind of push on management, push on their bosses, and everything to kind of explain why things have been done that way. A lot of times, that leads to making the processes better and pushing things forward.

James Sweetlove:
Great, we only have one more question here, so just to anyone who's still attending, if you have any questions, now would be the time to ask. We can get to them before we wrap up. The last one is, do you see the advancement of AI changing the way that anything's done in this sort of space? What are the changes that you see coming from that development?

Laren Dubkowski:
Yeah, I mean, that's what everybody's talking about right now, and internally, we've sat down and have had several meetings about this. This stuff is coming really fast, how do we utilize it both on the agency side and the Circuit Bread side? I mean, man, it's crazy because I think it's, in one sense, it's going to change everything. I would caution people, as we've been on calls with people where they say, oh yeah, now we can just bust out content like crazy, just paste in the prompts, and it spits out a thing, and then we do a video. Josh and I kind of just look at each other, and we're like, I don't think that's good long-term. It's a good way to put out a lot of content, but it's not a good way to build a good genuine user base that cares about your stuff. So I think the way that we're viewing that internally for content creation for the work that we do is just another very powerful tool. It's like everybody's gotten this super magic hammer that they can swing around, but it is just a tool, and ultimately, I think we all still have to do the work. It helps us check the work, it helps us make sure we don't get stuck, all those things, but I think use it as a tool and embrace it. Don't push it off and say, I'm never going to learn it, embrace it because it's here, and we'll all move forward, and it'll be great.

James Sweelove: 
It's one of those things I think that's just like other things, when people are resistant to the change it's coming, and you can be as resistant as you want, but that's going to be a skill that you don't have that other people who are applying for jobs will have. It's going to be detrimental to you overall to ignore it.

Laren Dubkowski:
Yeah,  I think it's interesting too, like we have this idea that when we get old, we kind of draw a line in the sand and say, like, oh, we're not GNA, we're not going to do that new technology thing. My mom, when Facebook started, she's like, I'd never put my stuff up on there, and now she uses it more than anybody I know. I was over at my friend's house the other day, and I was talking about this exact thing actually, and I asked my friend, we were talking about this, and I said, what is the technology that our generation is going to be like no that's like too far? We are not doing and not getting involved, and for some people, that's AI. For some people, that's augmented reality or virtual reality, so I turned to their young kids in the room. Well, first, I asked my friend who's my age. I said would you get an ocular implant that has this heads-up display and gives you information? All of us older people are like, yeah, that's like a little too far. I didn't think I’d do that, and I turned to the 12-year-old kid, and I was like, hey Luke, would you get an ocular implant? He's like, yeah. So yeah, I mean, I think it's important just to embrace new technology as much as possible otherwise, it'll kind of eat you. I think.

James Sweetlove: 
Yeah, I agree completely. I just have this one question and one comment, and then I just want to add one thing quickly, too. I read an article a little while ago saying that at a certain age, people's brains actually stop wanting to adapt to new things. It actually varies completely by person, and it relates to a lot of things in life, so think about everything ranging from new technology to trying new foods or even listening to new music. For some people, it starts as early as 25, according to the article. For some people, it's the mid-30s, and for other people, it never happens. So I thought that was interesting. Then the next question is, do you think programming goes hand in hand with electronics engineering? Is it expected in the industry, and with what programming languages? 

Joshua Bishop: 
That's crazy. I literally just wrote a paper about that yesterday or the day before. Yes, I do think it goes hand in hand. I think there are certain electrical engineers who won't need it on the power engineering side, there might not be as much; however, I think that being able to understand some of the basic languages expands everything and can simplify whatever you're doing. So it depends if you want to go into embedded systems, and that's kind of the focus of a lot of us here at Circuit Bread, a lot of the engineers, and so a lot of us do. Serge even does assembly, that's a little bit more esoteric for me, but those programming languages are very important. I would recommend C for anybody planning on going into the embedded system, and that's not even nice to have, that's basically, you need to know this if you plan on succeeding in that world. If you want to go down a level and actually do the digital hardware design, you could do VHDL or Verilog. There are debates between the two of them, and I don't really have the time or the inclination to really talk about which one of those two, but if you want to do digital hardware design and use FPGA stuff like that, you definitely should learn VHDL or Verilog. Now, that's actually one of those things where I think anybody could use C, and that's probably a good standard language to learn. Still, if you're not going to be learning about digital hardware design, you probably don't need to invest the time into VHDL or Verilog, so take that with a grain of salt. I would love to learn about it more, and Serge is actually hoping to teach me more about that, but we've just been too busy for me to really get into that as deeply as I'd like to. MATLAB is used a lot in school, but that's actually one of those things that can go outside of school as well, and it uses its own proprietary language, so that's very useful. Anything in circuits or signal analysis or control system or whatever, so that's something I'd recommend. Now, MATLAB is incredibly expensive. That's why we actually did some tutorials with Scilab, the free clone basically of MATLAB, and so if you're more of a student who wants to get into it or a hobbyist, definitely recommend the Scilab route because MATLAB  is pricey. And then Python is kind of useful just in general. That's a way to make some scripts that will automate your data-gathering stuff like that. It interfaces with different devices, so Python is a pretty simple, pretty straightforward language, and I think that's another one of those generic options. It would be good for almost everybody to have a good idea of how to use those. Again, not every electrical engineer will need to learn programming. Still, I feel that enough of them need to do it that it's a good idea for anybody to at least familiarize themselves with any of those languages. There are a lot of other languages out there that would possibly be important, but I feel like those are more of the high-level generic ones that you would find. If you want to get more detail, I don't know when that blog's going to go live, but eventually, the blog will go live, and you can read what I wrote and have a little bit more forethought and preparation into putting that together.

James Sweetlove: 
Lastly, just to finish up, I just wanted to read out the comment that was submitted. They said, I just checked out Circuit Bread, and I'm already surprised by the amount of knowledge.  Please keep it up. As a student, this is amazing. Thank you 

Joshua Bishop:
Awesome thank you very much, that's good to hear.

James Sweetlove: 
Yeah, okay, well, thank you both for presenting that. That was fascinating. I really appreciate the time that you took and everyone who tuned into the webinar, especially people who are still here, thank you so much; I appreciate it. There will be more in this series. We're going to have a bunch of different types of webinars coming in the future, so please stay tuned and make sure you subscribe to all of our future webinars. Thank you, everyone, and have a great day. 

Joshua Bishop: 
Thank you very much.