Talent Spotlight: Tyler Barron, Embedded Software Engineer
Talent Spotlight is a regular feature profiling Product Creation Studio’s talented team members. Are you interested in joining our team? View our open positions!
In this Talent Spotlight, we’re excited to feature Tyler Barron, Embedded Software Engineer. Tyler is an experienced Controls Engineer with a demonstrated history of working in the robotics and aerospace industries. He enjoys working in interdisciplinary engineering teams to solve problems and create products.
What are your hobbies and interests outside of work?
An example of Tyler’s generative art.
Outside of work I love hiking, climbing, running… anything involving exercising outdoors. These have culminated in half marathons, bike rides, and backpacking adventures throughout the west coast (and recently Colorado).
I also enjoy the application of the digital world towards artistic ends — either through generative art with a 1980’s pen plotter, trying my hand at recreating movie visual effects, or photography.
One project I’m proud of brought all of these interests together — I was able to use a 3d camera to track humans and rock wall holds to measure how a climber climbed a particular problem in a climbing gym.
What led you to a career in product development?
From a young age, my parents encouraged me to build things. This started with small projects like bird houses and iPod chargers and grew until I was spending weeks designing, prototyping, and building furniture and arcade cabinets.
My passion evolved to be more digital in nature — my degree in Mechanical Engineering pivoted to Mechatronics, my books on mathematics were swapped with books on software.
After college, I spent several years as an engineer in the robotics industry where I developed tools that existed between the mechanical and software domains. I eventually set out to find a job that was entirely in software which is how I found myself at Product Creation Studio!
What excites you most about your job?
I love the teams of people that I get to work with!
Product Creation Studio is great about organizing teams of engineers and designers. The collaboration lets us specialize while staying connected to the big picture. This helps me understand the dimensionality of the project which is great to see.
Describe your most rewarding work experience to date.
I’m most proud of the design that our team came up with for inter-process communication on a complex project. We designed a system that uses Redis, an emerging technology, for our database solution and communication method. Alongside big companies like Lyft and Mastercard we’re pushing the limits on this lightweight, fast data storage option. Implementing Redis made the code understandable, easy to write, and trackable while leveraging new schemas for how data can move. It was designed to be easily expandable too — as I write this, the team has been able to add all the features we’ve wanted without needing major rewrites.
What is the most unusual or interesting job you’ve ever had?
My last company was a robotics startup with twenty or so employees. While I was technically an engineer, I had to wear lots of hats. There were weeks where I was in charge of creating marketing videos, taking company headshots, and travelled to trade shows as a sales person. It made each day unique!
What is something about you people would be surprised to know?
Map with districts drawn optimized for blue. Blue wins 5/7 districts after 100,000 iterative flips.
Maybe not too surprising... but I love creating and solving logic puzzles. I’ll spend days working on problems centered on probability, math, or logic theory.
Some of my solutions have been featured on FiveThirtyEight in their The Riddler column. I’ll submit them if I think I have a novel way to attack a problem or come up with a fun visualization. For example, this problem had us create seven districts to gerrymander this map so that the red or blue team won the most districts. I came up with an approach that swapped districts iteratively until it reached a maximum.
See the video showing how the program flips districts.
After solving many of these problems, I tried my hand at designing some problems. Several have been published. Seeing thousands of people submit their answers, including their code and methodology, is incredibly fun. It gave me an appreciation for how many ways you can solve a problem!