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Electrical engineer John Chidgey joins us in this episode of The Engineering Commons to talk about ladder logic, podcasting, and an engineer’s role in making the world a better place.

• An open invitation to discuss general engineering issues got Jeff started in the world of podcasting.
• Carmen, Brian, and Adam became trapped involved as co-hosts on this podcast when Chris Gammell left the show.
• Our guest for this episode is electrical engineer John Chidgey, who has worked in several engineering domains, including RF hardware, systems engineering, and the oil & gas industry. He also produces a weekly podcast, Pragmatic, and authors the Tech Distortion website.
• Carmen and John are fans of making coffee with the Aeropress.
• Citizens band (CB) radio served to interest John in electrical engineering.
• John notes that there is a general trend toward standardization, as the costs of customization are too high for many companies.
• For a while, at least, John had a job that may (or may not have) required a security clearance.
• Our guest moved into the controls industry around 2003, installing programmable logic controllers (PLCs) for industrial clients.
• Many PLCs can be programmed using ladder logic, which originally was nothing more than a schematic for wiring together electromechanical relays.
• John has had some bad experiences programming PLCs with software implementing function block diagrams.
• “Where there is a choice, there is a problem.”
• After testing out several other podcast concepts, John launched the Pragmatic podcast to cover engineering topics in a practical and actionable manner.
• John mentions the Hypercritical blog, written by John Siracusa.
• Carmen is excited to read the recent OS X 10.10 Yosemite review that John Siracusa wrote for Ars Technica.
• “Engineering is all about tradeoffs.”
• In additional to covering technical topics, John’s podcast sometimes covers non-technical issues like weather forecasting and coffee.
• John reveals that he loves using whiteboards.
• A live chat room has recently been added as a feature of the Pragmatic podcast. Jeff doesn’t think he could handle the additional cognitive load while recording interviews.
• We’ve gone meta with a podcast about podcasting!
• John occasionally gets requests for career advice, although many times engineers write in to simply point out technical errors.
• According to our guest, engineers can change the world by providing reliable services and infrastructure that will improve people’s lives.
• John can be found on Twitter as @JohnChidgey and @PragmaticShow. His podcast is Pragmatic, and his website is Tech Distortion.

Thanks to Daniel Oines for the untitled photo of a crescent wrench. Podcast theme music by Paul Stevenson.