David Tatzel.

It started with screws. Whatever I could open as a kid — radios, the lawnmower, anything with a back panel — I'd take apart, lay the parts out on the floor, and work out how to fit it all back together. Some of it didn't fit on the way back. I learned from that too. The lesson stuck: every system, no matter how alien at first, is a stack of parts someone built and someone else can rebuild.

Forty-plus years on, I apply the same trick to everything. Figure out what the problem actually is. Break it into pieces small enough to be honestly faced. Solve each one. Reassemble. The medium changes — software, hardware, a microgrid, a bad week, a good team, a service panel, a transmission, a kid's hard question — but the discipline does not.

I want engineers and friends around me who may not yet know the answer but won't flinch from finding it. That stance has built my career, the team I lead at Savant, and the apps I ship on weekends. It also gets the dishwasher fixed.

Anything anyone touches has something in it that could be better — a workflow, a tool, a quiet friction nobody's bothered to name. The art is finding the real need under the surface ask. The science is the part after that: framing it as a problem worth solving, choosing the materials, and building toward the best version of the thing — not the first version that compiles. Most "feature requests" are the second sentence of a longer conversation; the first sentence is what to build.

Which leads to a rule I keep close: if a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing well. Make it feel like the perfect tool for the job — the one you reach for without thinking, the one that disappears into the work. The opposite — almost-right software, almost-right hardware — is its own kind of damage. It teaches users to expect less, and it lets the team's standard drift. I'd rather ship one thing that earns its place than five things that occupy it.