I run operations alongside the robots. Now I’m learning to build them.
I lead operations inside a heavily automated fulfillment facility, where I watch machine learning meet the physical world every shift. I’m working my way into the engineering behind it — the maths, the models, the robotics stack — and publishing every step of it here.
Eighteen years from the first floor to the deployment seat. Now the other direction.
2007 · First floor
A production engineering internship put me on a floor full of industrial automation for the first time.
Today · The deployment seat
Leading operations inside a heavily automated fulfillment facility. The machines run around my team every shift.
Now · Crossing over
Linear algebra → probability → ML → the robotics stack. Two public checklists, 2,000+ topics, and an explainer published for every box I check.
Every robot passes the demo. The test is Tuesday night.
Vendors sell the demo. Operators live the deployment. Everyone can see the gap between those two now, including the vendors. What I watch, every shift, is what closes it. I call it the Tuesday Night Test: 11pm on a Tuesday, a crumpled mailer, a new hire, a jam upstream, and nobody from the vendor in the building. The machines that survive that night have earned their place on the floor.
“Machines earn their place on a floor one uneventful Tuesday at a time.”
Four things I write about, all from the same seat.
Operator's take on robotics news
What the announcement says vs. what the floor will say.
Plain-English teardowns
How these machines actually work — the cameras, the grippers, the ML behind a single pick decision.
The Tuesday Night Test
What it takes for a machine to earn its place on a live floor: exceptions, night shifts, trust, and the boring work that closes the gap.
The learning log
Working through the maths and the robotics stack in public — every topic tracked, every checked box backed by a published explainer.
Two checklists, 2,101 topics. You can see exactly where I am.
I wrote the whole map before I started, so the denominator can’t move to flatter the numerator. A box only gets checked when something ships alongside it — so far that’s 16interactive explainers, written for the person I was three months ago. Everything I haven’t touched stays visible, which is nearly all of it.
- Topics mapped
- 2,101
- Boxes checked
- 17
- Explainers shipped
- 16
Robotics keeps calling the move from a lab capability to a working deployment its hardest unsolved problem. I already live on one side of that translation. I’m learning the other side in public, and this is the record of it.