First week - Starting Out (post #1)

Wednesday  ~ 5/11/2022 ~

        Diamond Z Engineering recently bought a neighboring house and expanded into it as a secondary office space. Their primary building holds around 20 people, while the house holds another 5. Starting out on my Hawken Project, my first day was spent acquainting myself with the staff at the offices. Dann Stapp’s primary team, and the one I was interning for, was housed in the house (pun intended). There is Dann, me, Taylor, Jason, and Caleb. Jason and Caleb were out on business trips, so it was just us three for the first day. I thought I would be getting right to work, and I didn’t really count the time spent “just talking” to people was work. However, I came to realize its importance on the drive out, especially since I had a positive experience with the team and was getting excited to work with them. How can you work with people if you don’t first see each other as people, and not just means to an end to another project? We’re all human first, so how can we be expected to do favors for or collaborate with each other without first earning it? I did actually do some work still, I learned the basics of how to use their primary software called AutoCad. Because I’ve used software like it in the past, it wasn’t too hard to pick up. (Future me here: the blocks and windows system was pretty confusing, and it did take me a bit to know what was going on there). I did my first “red lines,” which are basically just corrections for an AutoCad draft. We use a red pen to mark what was wrong, hence the name “red lines.” For my first one I just did titles and stuff, since the text was linked in the “blocks” system that I didn’t really understand yet. Now I do though, it’s basically just a group of shapes and text, but you can assign “attributes” to the block, meaning you can copy the whole thing over, but then just edit the text without changing anything else, and without having to go to each part of the text and change it manually. Instead, when you edit it, there’s a menu that shows the attributes name, and then a box you can type the value in to change it:

Thursday ~ 5/12/2022 ~

        Because I had an eye doctor appointment, I wasn't able to do much.

Friday ~ 5/13/2022 ~

        Will continue in next blog