Walker Engineering

Engineering, Management, Technology Consulting

  • I spent time with Alex helping him with a complicated site built door set.

    One Step Forward… Two steps back

    Two steps back.

    It has been awhile since we have posted anything, and as usual, it feels like so much has happened.  We had so much that we were excited to update you all on, until today when we hit a bit of a…speed bump.  I’m going to give you all a quick update on the past 2 weeks first though.

    The French doors, oh boy, those French doors.  The deal that we got on the doors fromReFit on Mississippi ended up costing us just as much as the original sliding glass patio door (not including my sanity, which I lost quite a bit of).  After a week of taking a crack at them on my own, I called in reinforcements.  Tiny house curious engineer extraordinaire, John, came to the rescue.  After another three days of work, we ended up getting those doors in correctly.  What I learned from this whole project?  Buy pre-hung doors.

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    John fixing one of my mistakes

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    Thar she swings!!!

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    Still standing!

  • Favorite article of the week was in Medium entitled “The big mistake nearly every designer makes”.  It applies to so many of us, so I gratefully embed it here to pass on.

    The big mistake nearly every designer makes.

  • You might think the perfect workday includes a promotion or a raise, or perhaps your evil boss getting fired. Sadly, such monumental events don’t happen very often.

    The good news is that there are plenty of little things you can do to improve both your productivity and your happiness if you feel stuck at your desk all day.

    One simple trick is to structure your time better — which includes taking more breaks. In fact, the highest performers work for 52 minutes consecutively before taking a 17-minute break, according to a recent experiment conducted by the productivity app DeskTime.

    Other helpful habits are even easier to pick up: Just going outside or taking a few minutes to watch the latest cute cat video can help make you a better worker.

    Sure, you might realistically not have enough time to incorporate all these suggestions in your daily routine, but every little bit helps. That’s why we’ve pulled together research and anecdotal evidence from a variety of sources to build the perfect workday.

    via [Huffington Post]

    BestWorkday

  • Jobs Charted by State and Salary

    Prominent industries in a state can say a lot about an area. Is there a lot of farming? Is there a big technology market? Couple the jobs with salary, and you also see where the money’s at. You see a state’s priorities.

    For example, look at California. You see an increased prominence of farmworkers and laborers, whereas the farming, fishing, and forestry sector is nearly nonexistent in many other parts of the country. I expected a lot more in the midwest states, but relative to the other occupations in those states, the farming sector doesn’t seem that big from an employee perspective.

    For a drastic change, switch to Washington, D.C., where people who work in the legal and business sectors are much more common. I realize it’s a comparison between a city and states, but whoa, that’s a lot of lawyers packed in one place.

    Move the median salary up a bit, and you get a sense of overall salaries (and a correlating cost of living, kind of) as you check out different states.

    Anyway, it’s an interesting first look at employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.