They say the factory never sleeps. Neither does the mind of someone who’s spent the better part of their life inside one — watching machines hum, processes evolve, and people try to make sense of chaos.
I’ve been on that floor — not just walking it, but understanding it. My background is in mechanical engineering, but my real education began when I entered the world of manufacturing. That’s where theory met noise, heat, labor, and expectation. Over the years, I’ve moved from tools to teams, from spreadsheets to strategy, from doing to leading. And now, I’m writing this journal to reflect on that path — and maybe leave behind a few useful breadcrumbs for others.
This won’t be a polished newsletter filled with buzzwords. It’ll be real:
- Real insights from managing shifts where machines and people both break down.
- Real struggles — like bridging the gap between planning and execution, or trying to simulate factory layouts at 2 AM in Python.
- Real questions — like how to manage conflicting priorities, or how to move from fighting fires to building systems.
- And real wins — when small changes led to big improvements.
I’m currently in a leadership role at a manufacturing plant, transitioning from solving problems myself to building systems that solve them at scale. I’ve studied Six Sigma, operations research, industrial automation, financial management — not to collect badges, but because I needed the tools to make better decisions. Along the way, I picked up Python, SQL, Excel modeling, and simulation — because data doesn’t lie, but it doesn’t speak unless you know the language.
This journal will be part technical, part philosophical. One day it might be about modeling man-machine ratios for forging; the next, about leadership frustrations or the politics of problem-solving. Some days I might just write about a book I’m reading or a quote that hit too hard.
If there’s a theme, it’s this:
Manufacturing is not just about making things. It’s about making sense — of systems, people, and progress.
So, here it begins. A personal log of lessons, thoughts, breakthroughs, and breakdowns — all through the lens of someone who believes factories still matter, and those who run them even more so.