Ruth Grace Wong
Site Reliability Engineer by day, manufacturing engineer by night
My email is my full name at gmail.com, no underscores or anything.
I've been moonlighting as a manufacturing engineer on the side. Lately I've been working on my own soft goods products (Leave Me Alone Sweater, USA Sewn Masks, and breathable underwear for pregnant women), and in the past I've helped my friend's company make hydroponic and aquaponic desktop kits. My experience is mostly with Chinese manufacturers.
I spoke about being a manufacturing engineer in my spare time at Hackaday Superconference
I spoke about my experience learning Firmware from the Firehose at Hackaday Superconference, and you can watch me debug some firmware live at Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic #34
I occasionally run a workshop with Rik Leipold about manufacturing plastic products out of sheet acrylic for startups to avoid high tooling costs
I've written about my experience with using Engineering Change Orders in China on Medium
For my day job I am a site reliability engineer at Pinterest. My team is responsible for keeping Pinterest up, by building systems, providing reliability consulting for other teams, and dealing with outages as they happen.
My coworker Rodrigo Menezes and I presented Containerization War Stories at SREcon18 Americas
I spoke at SaltConf17, SF Python Meetup, and PyCon Canada about a flamegraph profiling web app I made at Pinterest
I coauthored a Pinterest Engineering article about setting up a Python monorepo
I moderated a panel at SREcon17 Americas about Training New SREs
I ran a panel about Logistics at Scale at the San Francisco Effective Altruism Global conference 2017
I was featured as a Site Reliability Engineer on Khan Academy's Career Finance Profile
I use the Noisebridge Laser Cutter for a lot of projects, and teach laser cutter safety training. I also run a plastic prototyping service, and have prototyped parts for Aqua Design Innovations. Here are some of my favorite projects.
I have been taking Sew Good sewing lessons with Marilyn at SHARED, where I've been learning how to draft and sew my own patterns. My sewing successes include a collaboration with Betabrand for my Leave Me Alone Sweater. I would love to manufacture a sewn product in the future.
Self Watering, Root Pruning Cloth Pot
I like to draw with my brush pen from Daiso. Mostly I draw fishes.
It's important to document your projects and experience, even if things don't go as planned. Documentation is super easy with a smartphone.
I document manufacturing stories for Supplyframe Hardware, such as a profile of a Chinese manufacturer and mother of two, and a $100,000 manufacturing mistake
After documenting my Leave Me Alone Sweater on Instructables, it went viral and I sold some through Betabrand (and promptly spent all the money I made on a failed Kickstarter)
I gave a 5min talk about project documentation for 5 minutes of fame at Noisebridge
I document how to make my projects on Instructables