bombledmonk

DigiKey | Search Experience Manager | Thief River Falls, MN | Bloomington, MN | Hybrid

How do you help an electrical engineer find the right part among millions of highly technical, nearly identical components?

We’re hiring someone to own that problem across search, ranking, filters, discovery, experimentation, and AI/LLMs.

Electronics + search is a surprisingly deep problem space.

https://digikey.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Digi-Key/details...

Enjoyable episode. Check out his linkedin profile for some fun Easter eggs, I got a laugh.

That seems adequate. The lack of sort the filters makes it a bit challenging to use. I'd recommend either a sort or a text filter like what you seen on DigiKey. https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/microcontrollers/...

Rather than filter in brands, I'd rather filter out brands (aka exclude). Maybe just an include/exclude toggle there? A select all UI element, then deselect might also be adequate.

another +1

This should be the April Fools 2026 feature put directly on the live HN site.

fixed

I toured a farm in the middle of nowhere in northern MN quite a 7 years ago with this exact system.

Laser Guided Teat Seeking Milker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTERLJDKsIw

Automatic Crane feed loading system for the Roomba-like robots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDEIcZwQa-o

Reverse Roomba-like automatic feeding robot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-QFB827U-M

Good, I'm not the only one. Fully agree with the UX regression on 2 and 3.

I've actually been employing Emoji Separated Values (ESV), often , here and there when doing some of this kind of work. Granted, it's not standard, but it's been really useful when I've needed it.

*edit Apparently emojis don't fly here, but it was an index finger pointing right.

This is waaaaayy easier to read if you Print this to PDF.

It would certainly be nice if it could warn you when you are getting close to the beginning of the chat running off the end of it's capabilities.

I got rid of the top row.

The killer app for Firefox is it still allows some flexibility in tab management. Sidebery and TreeStyleTab have been my anchors in the FF ecosystem. The experience is so vastly superior for tab hoarders and tab-todo methodology that I really can't imagine using something else. I also use FF on android because it has ublock origin and dark reader addons. This make browsing the web on mobile far better. I actually hold little allegiance to FF as whole, I just haven't found any Chromium based browser that works as well for me.

I think this should be part of required reading for EE101 type classes in college. The hardcover for $25 shipped on amazon, it's really something everyone in electronics should own.

You mean like this? https://github.com/Digi-Key/KiCad-Push-to-DigiKey

I think the short answer to your question is yes.

You still have to be able to hook up few wires and you'll need to be able to power your LEDs and understand your power needs there, but the live compilation in web based development platform (that's served by the device, no cloud) makes it really ideal for rapid prototyping and getting up and running quickly. No fussing with Arduino IDE or compile times. It's one of those things that "just works".

If you want to see it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMKltz8ji0k

Anyone ever run across anything like this with a simple syntax that can do a timeline with split AND merges? I've always wanted something like the linux timeline [1] as an interactive timeline that can both split and merge.

[1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Di...

In many, but not all programs on windows you can paste plain text by using ctrl+shift+v. Outlook desktop is one of the few places where this hotkey does not work.

Before I knew there was a native hotkey combo, I created a autohotkey script that would do that and had a mini-tutorial that showed how.

https://forum.digikey.com/t/add-a-digi-key-search-hotkey-eve...

While I appreciate the sentiment of the topic of fuzziness and AI, this also breaks search for people who are looking for precision. For people who are used to a McMaster-Carr or Digi-Key style search where precision matters in results, the fuzziness introduces ambiguity and hampers repeatability. These are both very important when designing products. Amazon, Home Depot, and Lowes are a bear when trying to find something with very specific specifications, it's quite literally rage inducing to add a more specific keyword to q query and get more (wrong) results in the output.

Findchips advertising and the SaaS tools for sourcing/lifcycle/data aggregation of components is their moneymaker. Hackaday is basically subsidized through The rest of Supply Frame, along with offering marketing partnerships and other tangential marketing type services. There's a lot of things Supply Frame does and Hackaday/Tindy are not major targets of this acquisition.

The biggest play here is competition to Altium's Octopart purchase, especially with all of today's electronic component supply chain woes. The Siemens (Mentor Graphics/PADS/Expedition) + Findchips/SupplyFX data is likely one of the end goals where the value will be derived.

I've sampled many screenshot tools over the years and it seems like everyone has their opinions. This looks like an improved version of Lightshot which is one of my favorites, but had a few limitations.

My current (windows only) favorite is Screenshot Captor [1] which definitely has a power user bent, but I really like the ability to always both copy the screenshot to clipboard as well as save the screenshot for later use. There's a lot of power built into the annotation/editing tools and a million and one ways to configure/custom process stuff afterwards.

[1]https://www.donationcoder.com/software/mouser/popular-apps/s...

Firefox-csshacks [1] will let you do multi-level tabs in Firefox. I've been using it to give me 3 rows of tabs since Firefox broke Tabmix Plus. It's not as slick as an addon, but it shouldn't be a problem for anyone who lurks here. Clone a repo into your firefox profile directory and copy and paste a few lines of config to enable that feature. This is the sole feature that has kept me on the Firefox side of things.

[1] https://github.com/MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks

Brother's latest firmware updates on newer color lasers have locked out third party toner companies pretty well. It's a cat and mouse game, but Brother is no saint. I own an 11 year old Brother B&W laser that is still cookin'. I just went searching for a color laser and I still will probably go with Brother, but it's certainly not clear cut in terms of business practices.

How long ago was that? I've been thoroughly impressed with the installed o365 apps' ability to live multi-user edit these days.

Oh the days of Bing Cash back bonuses. I remember when they were offering 25% off ebay purchases for going through bing. In fact, I bought several high ticket items including an engagement ring.

Digi-Key Electronics | Search Product Owner | Full Time | MN (Bloomington or Thief River Falls)

Digi-Key (https://digikey.com) is a distributor of electronics components that supplies over 11 million different parts to Engineers, Manufacturers and Hobbyists around the world.

We are looking for someone to own the future of our best in class component search. Ideal candidates are passionate about the cross section of electronics and software, but need not be an expert in either. This position will lead agile teams with the goal of making Engineers' lives easier, more efficient, and to help uncover more effective ways to search, filter and understand how to find/choose new hardware technologies.

We have recently upgraded to Elasticsearch and React, Node, and have quite a bit of .NET C# infrastructure as well.

Onsite at one of two offices in MN is preferred, but remote is possible. The health benefits are amazing and it's a great environment for people with families. Checkout the job listing here. https://digikey.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Digi-Key/job/Thi...

The worlds best chicken incubators!

My experience has been quite good recently. I start them through they app and they have an express returns spot in the customer service area. I'll start the return before I even set out to the store, sometimes they'll just comp it and refund my money without returning.