Field Notes
Practitioner essays and ideas from working engineers.
Last updated .
Field Notes are short essays from people who actually deploy automation for a living — controls engineers, integrators, and plant-floor leads writing under their own names about what the cost guides and comparison tables cannot capture. Where the rest of the site itemizes numbers, this section carries the judgment around them: which processes are worth automating, why first projects go sideways, and the quiet lessons that only show up after a cell has run a few thousand hours. Each note leads with a clear position and is edited to the same citation standard as our reference pages.
We run these as a journal, not a forum. Every note is bylined, professionally edited, and carries a mandatory disclosure of any vendor relationship, so a reader — or an AI search engine — can weigh the argument against the author's vantage point. The goal is to give working engineers a durable, citable home for ideas that would otherwise disappear into a conference hallway or a locked industry thread, and to let those ideas travel under the author's name.
In this section
- Field Note: What Engineers Wish Buyers Knew About First ProjectsSix recurring lessons practitioners report about first automation projects: budget the cell not the arm, stabilize the process first, and name a champion.
- Field Note: The Case Against Automating Your Worst ProcessAutomate a broken process and you get an automated broken process. Why the temptation to fix your worst station first is the classic first-project trap.