By 21, I've already been a web developer, worked construction, and spent the last year and a half as a plant technician. This week I started school to become a controls technician.
That combination is the whole reason this blog exists.
The usual path into industrial controls runs through the electrical side — the typical entry point is a two-year degree in electrical technology, mechatronics, or instrumentation. I'm coming at it from the opposite direction. I worked as a web developer, so code is familiar ground, control panels aren't. I won't pretend I know yet how much of that transfers. But my bet is that writing software taught me enough about logic to help with the part that trips a lot of people up. What I need to learn is everything my code never touched, wiring, voltage, motors, the machines themselves.
Here's the short version of how I got here.
I went to trade school at BTECH for web and mobile development. After graduating I worked for a marketing company, ThinkBIG Marketing, where I helped build and maintain websites for local businesses and worked on features for bigger names like Gramicci, with some freelance work on the side. Software taught me how to think in systems: inputs, outputs, state, the difference between "it runs" and "it runs correctly."
Then in 2024 I left to work construction, running excavation and whatever else the job needed. It was the first time I was building something physical instead of something on a screen, and something about that stuck with me. In January 2025 I got on at Procter & Gamble as a plant technician. At our plant we handle our own maintenance, everything except the specialized electrical work, and I've spent the last year and a half working on and around the exact kind of automated equipment that controls people design and maintain.
That's where the itch turned into a plan. I wanted to be on the side that designs the logic, not just the side that keeps it running. Mostly that's a programming problem, and the programming is the part I'm most drawn to: writing the logic that decides what the machine actually does. The electrical knowledge is the other piece I don't have yet. Closing both gaps is why I'm back at BTECH, this time for the Automation course.
A few days in, I've already touched Dobot robot programming (teaching an arm a sequence of waypoints) and started on the basic electrical side. It's genuinely early. I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert at something I started this week.
And that's kind of the point of this blog.
I'm going to learn controls in public. As I learn, I'll write about what I discover, and when something reminds me of software development, I'll say so. A rung of ladder logic already looks suspiciously like a boolean expression to me. I'm three days in, so that's a hunch, not a conclusion. Some of these connections will hold up. Some won't. I'll find out which as I go.
Some posts will be explainers. Some will be case studies: real things I build, wire up, and break, documented start to finish. Some will just be notes from the ground floor of a career change.
If you're anywhere near this intersection, whether that's code, the plant floor, controls, or the messy space between them, I think you'll find something here worth reading.
Let's get into it.
Jacob
Hey, leave some feedback would love to hear from you!