I love this. I've been a professional dev for almost a decade now, and over the last couple of years have started migrating toward a blend of hardware and software/firmware development, and I can't get enough of learning to build physical things from scratch. I don't often get to iterate in this way at my job, and rebuild the same thing over and over, so I tend to spend my free time with projects like this that start out shitty, and you get to take the time to comb over the details, making constant prototypes.<p>I started a deep dive in electronic music and synthesizers in the last couple of months, and have been thoroughly enjoying playing the productions units I own (Korg Monologue, Elektron Digitakt, Roland JV1080), but have even more so enjoyed the sort of free form effort of building my own instrument:<p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/FZ6GFsI" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/FZ6GFsI</a><p>That started out as a nightmare breadboarded voltage controlled oscillator, to a nicely breadboarded vco, to a rebuild on perf board, and then obviously I needed a perfboard power supply. But, once I wanted a mixer, I needed +/- 12v, not just 5v, so that led to a better iteration of the power supply, etc. It's a rabbit hole, but an immensely educational and fairly inexpensive one. I figure I'm about 3 months and a couple of YouTube tutorials away from my first Kicad developed oshpark printed PCB, and I have a ton of ideas for next steps, and prototypes in flight (CES3340 based VCO, Arduino MIDI control and CV translation, Lowpass/bandmiss filters, so on and so forth).<p>Back to the subject of the original post, this totally looks like Pennsylvania, and if it is and the engineer who built this is in the job market, and has any interest in working for a smaller, established (20 year) shop that lives in one of the automotive spaces doing a lot of cool custom hardware/software development, I'd happily accept a resume.