The essay
The prompt
Briefly describe an intellectual experience that has meant the most to you.
The cat would not stop crying at three in the morning. Most people would have shut the window. I got out my Arduino and three motion sensors.
My neighbour's orange tabby had been waking the whole building for weeks, and asking politely had achieved nothing. So I mapped his route along the fire escape, logged two weeks of thermal readings so the system would ignore birds, and built a sprinkler that triggered only for something cat-shaped and cat-warm.
Seventeen iterations, four sensor layouts, and one waterlogged notebook later, it worked. He found a new route. The building slept.
I did not solve a global problem. I solved a local one nobody had asked me to solve, which is, I have come to think, the definition of an engineer.
