Building Trust with Engineers and Integrating Community Feedback

Exploring the significance of engaging with the community, overcoming skepticism, and illustrating automation advantages with rapid sophisticated board designs, leading to enthusiasm from certain engineers.

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Episode 128

I spoke with Sergiy Nesterenko about:

* Developing an automated system for designing PCBs

* Difficulties in human and automated PCB design

* Building a startup at the intersection of different areas of expertise

By the way — I hit 40 ratings on Apple Podcasts (and am at 66 on Spotify). It’d mean a lot (really, a lot) if you’d consider leaving a rating or a review. I read everything, and it’s very heartening and helpful to hear what you think.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

Sergiy is founder and CEO of Quilter. Sergiy spent 5 years at SpaceX developing radiation-hardened avionics for SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy's second stage rockets, before discovering a big problem: designing printed circuit boards for all the electronics in these rockets was tedious, manual and error prone. So in 2019, he founded Quilter to build the next generation of AI-powered tooling for electrical engineers.

I spend a lot of time on this podcast—if you like my work, you can support me on Patreon :)

Reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro

* (00:45) Quilter origins and difficulties in designing PCBs

* (04:12) PCBs and schematic implementations

* (06:40) Iteration cycles and simulations

* (08:35) Octilinear traces and first-principles design for PCBs

* (12:38) The design space of PCBs

* (15:27) Benchmarks for PCB design

* (20:05) RL and PCB design