About

My name is Tracy and this is my website covering some of the projects I’ve worked on. It pretty much serves as a record to reflect on at times.

I like working on projects involving mechanical, electrical and software features. Since I was a kid, I liked electronics. At one point, my neighbor and I installed a cable to each others bedrooms where we could communicate to each other. I think I was about 8 at the time. We would walk to Radio Shack and drool over the stuff they had. I remember the kit with red and clear box.

They had these spring terminals that you solder the wires on the back side of the red perfboard. The box, being made of polystyrene, would melt when you soldered to the terminal which was fairly disgusting.

I’ve had an interest in computers since the IBM PC was first released. At one point I submitted a patch to Turbo Pascal 1.0

By the time Ziff-Davis published the article, Turbo Pascal 2.0 was released. The editors were amazing at that time and made updates to work with the latest compilers.

In my 20’s, I was making test fixtures for AT&T and used a drill press with an XY table to mill small panel cutouts. I had a friend that saw this and introduced me to machining (the right way).  I bought a milling machine it Atlanta which had  a metric table and a knee in English. That was a mess, then got a DRO for $50 at an auction and the problem was alleviated. I was using Autocad 2.52 at that time and wrote macros in Lisp.

Eventually I joined AT&T at about the time they spun off Lucent and worked in the OASICS group (Optical ASICS). We made 80 channel Mux/Demux units for various customers including Cicsco. Lucent closed shop in Atlanta to consolidate the wafer fab with packaging in Breinigsville, PA. They expected to relocate about 20 engineers from Atlanta. About 2 people relocated. A better way would have been to have engineers from PA come to Atlanta and learn the process. So I needed a new job and had prospects in Dallas, Baltimore and Fremont, CA.  I offer was offered a position at Wavesplitter in Fremont, CA. with a higher salary to cover the higher cost of living so I accepted.  That was a good decision because a few years later the Lucent-Breinigsville facility closed and this was in farm country!

Wavesplitter also paid to move my equipment. I had 2 mills, 2 lathes, a bandsaw and a lot of other equipment.  This was all moved into the company to create a full machine shop.

After the Dot Com bust, I joined a medical device startup company which I very much enjoyed. I’m not much of a people-person and like the near absence of tribal knowledge. I can usually find out everything I need using the documentation system. Everything is well documented which suites me just fine.