The Engineering Passion Express

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Brandon has been chasing a strange question for a long time: why does he love engineering simulation as much as he loves cooking, storytelling, and bowling? The answer showed up while watching the show The Bear. Underneath all of it is the same pursuit, not perfection, but mastery, the kind of deep understanding that quietly makes every decision better.
This episode maps out a "reversibility spectrum," from a CAD edit you can undo in minutes to decisions you can never take back, a bridge, an aircraft delivery, a medical implant, moments where reality only gives you one chance to find out if you were right. We revisit two stories already told on this podcast, Gustave Eiffel betting his fortune on a tower that might not stand, and Daniel Burnham racing an unmovable deadline to build the White City.
Along the way, a quiet shift in thinking: experience doesn't build mastery, feedback does. 
Join me as we explore:
Why engineering has always been about decision-making, not perfect design
The four levels of the "reversibility spectrum," and why irreversible decisions demand the most mastery
What Gustave Eiffel and Daniel Burnham's irreversible bets can teach us about high-stakes decision-making
Why feedback, not experience, is what actually builds mastery
How simulation tools accelerate the feedback loop engineers need to build judgment
Support the show
The Engineering Passion Express is about growing knowledge and the passion for engineering. 

If you are a conference organizer and are looking for an engineering or scientific speaker to inspire or educate in a keynote presentation, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can find my profile below. 

Thanks for listening,
Brandon Donnelly
Please connect with me on linkedin @ linkedin.com/in/brandondonnelly

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Every engineering decision is a bet about the future, but when should you actually try to optimize a design, and when should you just build for robustness instead? In this episode of The Engineering Passion Express, we trace the answer through 2,000 years of engineering history, from Roman aqueduct builders who worked by trial and repetition, to Newton's calculus turning motion and force into something predictable, to steam engines and aircraft becoming genuine optimization problems once the physics were well understood.
Then we push into today's frontier: modern semiconductors, where individual transistors are some of the most precisely optimized structures ever built, but the interaction of billions of them together creates a level of complexity we can't fully predict. That's where the real question becomes "How do you design for what you don't yet understand?"
Along the way we borrow an idea from an unlikely source, Jeff Bezos's "regret minimization framework," and apply it to engineering: instead of chasing peak performance, minimizing the cost of being wrong.
Join me as we explore:
Why optimization only works once assumptions, constraints, and variables are well understood
How steam engines and early aircraft mark two different eras of engineering certainty
Why modern semiconductor design has to move from optimization to robust design
How "regret minimization" gives you a different way to design under uncertainty
Why every leap in certainty eventually creates a new frontier of complexity we don't understand yet
Support the show
The Engineering Passion Express is about growing knowledge and the passion for engineering. 

If you are a conference organizer and are looking for an engineering or scientific speaker to inspire or educate in a keynote presentation, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can find my profile below. 

Thanks for listening,
Brandon Donnelly
Please connect with me on linkedin @ linkedin.com/in/brandondonnelly

Send us Fan Mail
Engineers have no shortage of places to spend their time, or even places to spend their careers. In an ideal world, it would be clear what your company values, in reality it isn't. Rather than lament, working on understanding how you can work in the areas that you both like and is recognized as valuable is a worthwhile effort. 
In this episode, I'll cover at an extremely high level how company executives look at things, so that you can do your best work AND be rewarded for it. 
We'll go through what a company needs, why messages don't cascade down cleanly, how to get a pure signal about what is valuable and look at examples.
The goal of this episode is to raise your profile, and your career by working on things that will be valued.
It's an important topic, and definitely worth the 15-20 minute listen. 
Support the show
The Engineering Passion Express is about growing knowledge and the passion for engineering. 

If you are a conference organizer and are looking for an engineering or scientific speaker to inspire or educate in a keynote presentation, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can find my profile below. 

Thanks for listening,
Brandon Donnelly
Please connect with me on linkedin @ linkedin.com/in/brandondonnelly

Send us Fan Mail
This episode is the companion episode to "The 100 year Journey from Surgeons with Reputations to Surgical Robots". It frames the value that you can takeaway for your engineering career. 
In this episode we discuss things such as:
1. Industry differentiation and the pressures that force it
2. Where values reveal themselves
3. Industry recognition vs. customer recognition
4. Who is rewarded under different paradigm
5. The right champions matter for technological adoption
6. The need for champions
Support the show
The Engineering Passion Express is about growing knowledge and the passion for engineering. 

If you are a conference organizer and are looking for an engineering or scientific speaker to inspire or educate in a keynote presentation, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can find my profile below. 

Thanks for listening,
Brandon Donnelly
Please connect with me on linkedin @ linkedin.com/in/brandondonnelly

Send us Fan Mail
If you're an engineer trying to figure out where you can create value, this episode shows you where to look: where values themselves are shifting.
In this episode of The Engineering Passion Express, I take you on a 100-year journey from open surgery to surgical robots through three lenses: First, a sick man in 1910 traveling to New York to pick the right surgeon. Second, Dr. John Wickham, who coined 'Minimally Invasive Surgery.' And finally, Fred Moll, who founded Intuitive Surgical, who along with a team of engineers brought surgical robots to the forefront.
Join me and learn how many times before an invention comes along, the values of an industry need to shift to make it the right time for the adoption of the technology to be a benefit. 

Support the show
The Engineering Passion Express is about growing knowledge and the passion for engineering. 

If you are a conference organizer and are looking for an engineering or scientific speaker to inspire or educate in a keynote presentation, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can find my profile below. 

Thanks for listening,
Brandon Donnelly
Please connect with me on linkedin @ linkedin.com/in/brandondonnelly