I also just started going through the EE lab setup from scratch after 20 years of programming. What a great little guide, and matches my experience thus far (th

I also just started going through the EE lab setup from scratch after 20 years of programming. What a great little guide, and matches my experience thus far (though the author is way more organized). I'm pretty proud of the little parts system I've made, albeit much more primitive. I use pretty exclusively Mouser at this point so I invested in a cheap barcode scanner and just keep the bags in a box since I have limited space. I have a parts database that wraps SQLite and has operations such as "inventory" (taking inventory of my existing parts, updating counts), "shipment" which is a quick way to increase counts of a new shipment of parts (I just have to scan the mouser ID and then the part quantity), and "populate" which decrements each part by one per scan as I'm populating a board. It's one of those quick-hack-and-slash setups that is really fun to build and is just another part of the yak shaving process. Overall getting into PCB design has been a very, very fun hobby, and since I have real projects I need custom PCBs for, it's been a great supplemental skill to have. Cool article!