What started as a fun evening activity for a small group of our summer new hires quickly turned into a weekly tradition amongst trivia-minded members of our entire DMC Chicago team. The whaddayaknow free pub trivia group hosts game nights at bars all around Chicago and bi-annual tournaments for the top teams from each bar.

DMC’s team can be found competing under the moniker “Frank’s Monkeys,” and we easily identified as the only team likely to cheer whenever MATH is announced as a category. Team sizes are limited to eight players, so, on especially popular trivia nights, we have had to split into multiple teams with our second team taking the name “Frank’s Donkeys.” This once hilariously resulted in an announcer asking if Frank happened to have a farm.

To help coordinate our team(s) and keep up the hype from week to week, we started #hire-smart-trivia-people, an internal Slack channel, with reminders to RSVP. Keeping consistent with all DMC-related events, +1’s and families are always welcome! Emoji polls are the preferred method of attendance tracking — the more creative the better.

Every Wednesday, Frank’s Monkeys would meet at Innjoy in Wicker Park to enjoy a few rounds of drinks, snacks, and, of course, Trivia. In addition to learning fun facts about random trivia categories, we also continue to learn a lot about each other. Alex Adamsky, for instance, is really into Robocop and takes every opportunity available to talk about how great it is. “Robocop” has also become our default answer for questions we truly don’t know.

Yamini Yedetore discovered a special affinity for vocabulary questions — especially when they involve finding mashups of words (like a clue involving Sweden and Vodka, referring to “Svedka”).

Charlie Gordon is undoubtedly the backbone of the team, bringing expansive knowledge of U.S. presidents, world geography, and Taylor Swift. In the words of Izzy Rankin, “I think [Charlie] was born to do trivia.”

This past “season” of Trivia started at the end of September. Scores were tallied for 10 consecutive weeks, and the top teams from each bar were invited to the Tournament of Champions (TOC), which was held on January 21^st at Joe’s on Weed Street. There were over 100 teams in attendance!

Frank’s Monkeys had a blast at the TOC — Izzy joined the team with less than 24 hours’ notice to round out our 8-person squad. Prior to the final round, all teams got to participate in a couple bonus rounds of Music Bingo. In addition to his insane amount of knowledge about obscure European sports and 90’s-00’s network sitcoms, Tikhon “T” Pachin carried the team through music bingo with his proficiency in “dad rock!"

The team was also thrilled to get BOTH final round trivia questions correct! According to the final standings, Frank’s Monkeys landed in the upper 1/3 of top Trivia teams throughout the Chicagoland area at a satisfactory #33.

We can’t wait for another chance to test our wits at the next Tournament of Champions! In preparation, we have been seeking a new “home” bar, balancing commute distances and personal schedules for all team members as we weigh our options. A recent decisive first place finish at Fatpour (that came with a generous cash prize of $75 towards our next bar tab!) has us feeling confident in a strong upcoming Trivia season for Frank’s Monkeys.

Learn more about DMC's company culture, and contact us today for your next project.

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Inspired by fall and the massive piles of pumpkins available at every local grocery store, the Chicago office decided to hold a pumpkin-palooza activity fund evening at the office!

We Design!

Our night started off with a brainstorming session. Some attendees chose to partner up to maximize creative input on each pumpkin carving sketch. Inspiration came from all sources, from DMC’s core values and logos to the cutest office dog being Pippin, and even DMC’s extensive Slack emoji library. 

We Dine!

Good food and drinks are a necessity at any DMC activity fund event, so, before rolling up our sleeves, we ordered some pizzas for dinner!

Specialty drinks for the evening included: hot toddies (courtesy of Aleks K, personalized to taste), spiced wine (courtesy of Ben D), and cider with spiced rum (courtesy of the well-stocked DMC kitchen!).

We Scoop!

Of course, the first step in carving pumpkins is getting elbow deep in pumpkin guts. We busted out the tools from our brand-new carving kits, which included two “super goop scoops,” and we got to work emptying out our gourds.        

We Carve! 

Stomachs sated and mugs full of tasty warm beverages, we got to work on our pumpkins. Marilyn finished her “Elmo Rise” pumpkin in record time after completely free-handing the carving!

Tim got creative and tried out some shading techniques to create our DMC logo!

Alex and Davi carved the spitting image of King Boo, complete with crown!

My pumpkin was inspired by my favorite fall themed “thinking” slack emoji – the “Think-o-Lantern.” 

          
All of our pumpkin artists did a fabulous job getting our office ready for spooky season! Stay tuned for more fall fun at DMC!

Learn more about DMC’s corporate culture.

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DMSki 2020 was the last YOE before the first lockdown in 2020. It was only fitting that DMSki was the first official YOE in our not-quite-post-COVID era of office re-openings. Our crew took precautions before starting the festivities – everyone had to receive a negative PCR test result prior to the weekend. Once we all arrived in Denver or Breckenridge, we took rapid tests to be safe.

New House, Who’s This?

After many years of renting the same lodge in Silverthorne, we decided on something a little different! The new house was conveniently located in Breckenridge. The majority of DMSkiers with Epic Passes were able to take one of Breckenridge Mountain’s shuttle buses to and from the slopes each day. However, the most gung-ho skiers wanted to ensure they made first and last chair every day with no wasted time. They insisted that the walk to and from the slopes wasn’t that bad!

First, we explored all 3 floors to help each other locate which of the 13 bedrooms we had each selected for the trip. The new house also meant a new kitchen to get familiar with as we cooked breakfast and dinner each day. 

As usual, our talented DMChefs did not disappoint. Morning menus ranged from breakfast burritos to more frozen waffles than we could consume. Dinners featured a spaghetti bar, pizza, and the most delicious sliders (shoutout to Oliver Reed for almost single-handedly preparing the tastiest tiny sandwiches!)

The new house featured a snazzy gear room to stash our equipment in the evenings. The boot rack was equipped with warming tubes – perfect for pre-heating our boots and gloves before chilly mornings on the mountain!

Triumphs & Tribulations 

DMSki is such a fun event, it attracts skiers and snowboarders of all levels from offices all over the country. Seasoned natives lead the charge down the more challenging slopes on the mountain. Although snow conditions were not ideal this year, the most adventurous skiers chose to brave the wind and hard packed snow to check out the Peak 7 bowls – including John Williams, who decided to bring a snowboard on the trip this year instead of his regular skis.

John recalls heading down the treacherous slope at the top of double black diamond Whale’s Tail thinking, “this would be a really bad time to fall”, only to see Nikhil sliding headfirst through a particularly rough patch. A little rattled but high on adrenaline, the adventurers made it down the challenging slope in one piece… and did not feel the need to do a second lap.

Stephen Shull successfully navigated through a challenging tree-filled mogul run called “Ore Bucket”. Needless to say, his pose indicates he struck gold! Gabby Martinez, who recently relocated from Texas to our Denver office, reports that she made it down her first-ever black diamond with the Ikon pass squad at Copper mountain.

This trip marked Ramone’s first time ever on skis. He recounted a messy “yard-sale” fall on one run on the first day, but by the last day ,“I knew my goal. I needed to finish Lower Lehman without falling. After learning parallel turns and practicing them all day, I embarked down Lower Lehman. Taking the widest possible turns, I slowly descended down the slope without falling and declared my trip a success!”

My group spent Friday afternoon perfecting our turns through the glades on Peak 7 in search of an elusive woodsy hut. In a rare moment of overconfidence, I opted to “send it” over (what I thought was) a small snow-covered log. I quickly realized the mound of snow was hiding the rest of the tree and landed hard on my face, cutting our hut hunt short for the day.

With ski patrol’s blessing, despite having no kids in tow, we took ourselves through Rip’s Ravine and found some other fun huts instead.

With a mild concussion, I thought I was going to have the worst crash/injury story of the trip – only to walk back into the house and see Tommy sporting a black eye and a chipped tooth (as well as a concussion of his own).

Tommy had also been enjoying catching some air on one of his runs and hit a bump with a kicker on it. The landing area was obscured by the jump itself which led to a miscalculation between amount of air gained on the jump and distance to the surprisingly flat landing.

Thankfully, all our DMC cohorts are smart enough to wear helmets… maybe next year we’ll exercise a little more caution to look before we leap.

On Saturday, a second search squad was successful in hunting down the smoke hut I missed out on. Despite some unpleasant odors around the hut, the interior decorations were so cool it was definitely worth the adventure to find it.

Hot Toddies and Hot Tub Bodies

The best way to nurse some tired and bruised bodies after hard days on the slopes is with some après ski beverages and a nice, warm hot tub. At the new house, getting to the hot tub required walking through the snow (note to self: bring sandals next year)!

The first crews back from the slopes got first dibs on the best spots in the tub, and front row seats to watch others slip and slide down the increasingly icy path to enter.

 
Hot to cold transitions are good for circulation, right? Maybe that’s why some crazy people chose to jump into the icy stream next to the hot tub when they started to get a little too toasty. “Just jump in the stream, Nikhil. Everyone is doing it!”

Big Hydration

After the retirement of an old favorite game called “big container”, this year’s DMSki crew invented a new game dubbed “big hydration”. The rules are pretty simple: obtain the biggest vessel you can find, fill it with water, and pass it around chanting “BIG HYDRATION.”

It was definitely a hit and we’re looking forward to introducing it at future DMC events where people could use some extra hydration.

All Fun & Games

Rejuvenated by the hot tub, hydration games, and dinner, the squad broke out into groups for all sorts of games every night. Some of our DMC game night classics made regular appearances: Blokus, Codenames, and Bananagrams.

We also tried out some new games, like ‘Skull’ – an easy game to learn. Skull involves betting, a little bit of luck, and a sprinkle of social psychology.

The layout of the new house meant quieter games that required more focus took place upstairs, while the rowdy crew of beer drinkers headed down to the basement to set up some more high-energy games. Supply chain issues made red solo cups hard to come by in Breckenridge village!

Two brave soldiers ventured out to get ping pong balls and passably suitable cups from the local convenience store so we could play stack cup and bobsled.  

“Ski” You Next Year!

With all the remote new hires and people working from home, there were many faces on this trip that I didn’t recognize on the first night! But after four days of playing games, sharing stories, and even occasionally talking about work, I can’t help but be grateful for finally being able to spend time together.

As we bade goodbye and packed up our cars to head home, we speculated about which office would be the next to throw a YOE this year. One thing’s for sure – barring any more ¬unforeseen circumstances – we will all be first in line to sign up for DMSki 2023.

Learn more about DMC’s company culture. 
 

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My experience drawing graphs on Siemens HMIs has mostly involved trend views which show live data as a function of time. Visualizing cam profiles for this project involved datalogging methods coupled with an f(x) trend view.

Two resources that were imperative to setting this up were this Siemens blog (Creating an f(x) Trend View for Comfort Panels and WinCC Runtime Advanced) and this DMC blog (Custom Data Logging using a Siemens Comfort Panel and VB Script). I found the implementation very interesting and highly encourage the use of this visualization strategy for future motion control projects.

This blog in particular will take you through the step-by-step of creating a basic project, adding the VB Script for datalogging, and configuring your trend view.

Step 1: Array Setup

For the purposes of this application, we set up eight arrays to capture key position data from each axis. These arrays are local to the HMI so that operators can preview changes. When they are satisfied with the results of the preview, they can run a separate script that copies the HMI data to the PLC. To set up my test application, I defined all of these arrays in a tag table on the HMI.

Then, I created an HMI screen with I/O fields for each of these array values.  

Step 2: Add Script to Log Data

Now that we can adjust our array values from the HMI, it’s time to create some data logs. To display our data on the built-in f(x) trend view, we need to ensure that all the (X, Y) value pairs we will be graphing have identical timestamps. We are using a script to achieve the data logging to ensure that an identical timestamp is used for all data, the values can be archived on demand, and that the input arrays are stored as a series of individual values. 

The script is the meat and potatoes of this whole project, so we’ll go through it chunk by chunk. One important thing to note is that Windows PCs, like the computer I am simulating this project on, use slightly different syntax for file-handling functions than Windows CE, which is the operating system running on Siemens Comfort panels. Please see “Changes for Windows CE” below for the updates that need to be made to the script for deployment on actual hardware.

The first step in our script is to declare variables. I determined it was easiest to create 4 separate trend logs for our 4 separate trends. The split sign in this CSV file is set as a semicolon for this example. Data delimiters may vary by the country setting of the operating system.

Next, we assign the values in our tables to arrays that live on the HMI. We also create our CSV files that will hold our logs. The filename of each CSV file has a “0” appended on the end – this was important during testing to get it to match up with our historical data configuration (keep reading for more information on this). 

Now that the old files are gone, we must create new files to store new data. Each file is instantiated with a header.

Next, we get to add all of our data.

The last bit of our script opens the logs and ends the function.

Finally, I created a button on the graph screen to call our script. The return value is populated if any errors occurred during our script execution. The button also re-loads the screen to ensure the trend refreshes with the new values.

In summary, the following internal HMI tags are used in this demonstration:

Step 3: Configure Historical Data

Now we need to set up our data logs and logging tags under the “Historical data” section of our HMI project. These log names and process tags match what I am using in my script. 

For the path, since I am simulating this project on my computer, I used my C: drive. To do this, I had to ensure that my folder sharing permissions were set to allow sharing.

Step 4: Configure Trend View

On my trend screen, I created an f(x) trend view.

For my project, I have a single X axis with units in millimeters.

I created two Y axes for displaying trends in both millimeters and degrees. 

Step 5: Simulate & Test

Since this project only uses tags that are internal to the HMI, I was able to simulate and test the HMI by itself. I randomly generated some values to put in my input table, and then I navigated to my chart view and ran my script by pressing the “update trend” button. 

Step 6: Changes for Windows CE

Steps one to five work great for creating a standalone project that can be simulated on a Windows PC; however, Windows CE and Windows PC have some different syntax in VBScript when it comes to handling the file system.

First of all, creating the files and instantiating the file system look slightly different (see below for a comparison). In this version of my script, the Windows PC syntax has been commented out and the Windows CE version is active.

Likewise, deleting our files requires a slightly different file system command.

Setting up our archives uses a different command as well.

See the image below for differences in how to create a header for the data log.

Conclusion

This use of data logging and trend views is pretty nifty! Our client was especially grateful for the ability to visualize cam profiles before running them on their machine. I hope this blog helped to clarify some of the steps in the process. I look forward to finding more creative ways to utilize this script in the future. 

Learn more about DMC’s Siemens expertise and contact us for your next project.
 

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Sysmac Studio Quick Connect

When you launch Sysmac Studio, there will be an option on the left-hand side of the landing page that says Connect to Device. When you click on this option, you will be brought to the screen shown below.

If you are connecting through Ethernet, even if directly to the PLC, you may need to select Ethernet connection via a Hub. This is because various computer settings and configurations may cause Sysmac to think you are using a hub.

You may also need to specify the remote IP address of the device you are connecting to. The default IP address for Omron PLCs is 192.168.250.1. Further, be sure to verify  your computer is on the same subnet as the PLC to communicate.

When connecting directly with a USB, select Direct connection via USB. If this doesn’t work, try Remote connection via USB, and if the connection is still unsuccessful, read on for troubleshooting tips!

Troubleshooting USB Connections

Omron drivers should install automatically when you plug the PLC into your computer’s USB port. Ensure that your drivers appear in the Communications Middleware folder along with the other Omron program files.

In practice, we did run across an issue with some Windows 10 PCs where the proper USB drivers did not automatically install, which prevented us from being able to go online with any Omron devices over USB. According to Omron support, a possible fix would be to uninstall Sysmac Studio and reinstall with the Windows security settings turned off; however, we opted to use the Ethernet connection instead.

Going Online in Your Project

From the Controller Menu in your project, select Communications Setup. Select the connection method and enter the IP address of your device. From the Communications Setup window, you can easily execute a USB or Ethernet communications test to ensure your settings are correct.

Using the Omron Communications Utility

Installation of Omron’s Sysmac Studio also provides access to a program called Communications Middleware. This program is a network browser, which can be a useful tool for discovering devices on your network that are discoverable through each of the same connection options available in Sysmac studio – direct or remote access through USB or Ethernet.

 The installation folder for communications middleware is located at C:\Program Files\OMRON\Communications Middleware. Inside this folder, there is an exe file labeled Network Browser. Launching this program brings up an interface similar to the Quick Connect tool.

Choose your communication method, then press Browse. The program will scan for all discoverable devices on the network.

I hope this blog has been helpful in figuring out how to connect to your Omron NJ PLC!

Learn more about DMC’s PLC programming and contact us to get started on your next Omron project.

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We kicked off the 2020 YOE calendar with another spectacular weekend in Silverthorne, CO. Forty DMCers and their plus ones took on Vail, Breck, Beaver Creek, and Copper Mountains with steeze (that’s mountain slang for style + ease).

Shenanigans on the Slopes

Blue skies and warm weather welcomed the DMC crew to the slopes each day! With a few inches of fresh powder overnight on Wednesday, we had beautiful conditions all weekend at every resort. Our crew has grown significantly since the early years of DMSki trips, and we split up to different mountains during the day. About half the group had passes for Copper Mountain, and the other half explored different Vail resorts each day.

Blue Sky Basin at Vail really lived up to its name this year. The Epic Pass gang met for lunch outside at the peak where we enjoyed the warm sun, gorgeous views, and snow angels in fresh, deep powder.

Some of us took “hitting the slopes” a bit too literally. With almost everyone skiing and riding all day from the first chair until 4 pm, there was certainly no shortage of “yard sale” wipeouts, mogul mishaps, and close encounters with trees. Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt – Jon’s jacket took the most damage, but still didn’t keep him off the slopes for the rest of the trip!

My crew, bored of the flat catwalk run we were taking down the front side of Vail, decided to take a shortcut back down to the base. We ended up on a black diamond trail called “Pepi’s Face,” infamous for being steep and icy in the afternoons, and became unwitting participants in a wipeout contest. Dozens of onlookers from nearby restaurants and base area gave a riotous standing ovation to Mike for a spectacular wipeout after hitting a particularly icy patch on our last run of the day.

Mountain Munchies

Even though our group varies significantly in skill level and fearlessness on the slopes, we all made sure to meet up for lunch each day. It was great to meet up with the whole squad and compare notes on our favorite runs while we refueled for the rest of the day.

John King made sure the entire Copper Mountain crew was aware of his favorite waffles at Flyer’s lodge.

On Saturday, part of the Epic Pass group decided to venture out Beaver Creek mountain. Rumor has it, Beaver Creek gives out free cookies every day! Sure enough, as we made the trek through the ski village up to our first lift in the morning, we were each handed a chocolate chip cookie. At 3 pm (which is official “Cookie Time”), we made sure we were at the base of Centennial Express to receive two more fresh, warm cookies each.

The Copper crew ended each of their days with an Apres Ski beer at the Ten Mile Tavern with gorgeous views and great company. 

Apres-Ski Adventures

DMC engineers are some of the biggest board gamers I’ve ever met – we all had plenty of opportunities to jump in on new games and old favorites when we got back to the house each evening. From the most intense game of Bohnanza, a bean farming card game, to thought-provoking rounds of Codenames (“Is a ship a place?”), there was no shortage of (mostly) friendly competition to join in on.

A new favorite this year was a card game called “Oh Fruck!” which combines rules from games like Uno and King’s Cup. We tried to play with more than the recommended number of players. We ended up going around for over an hour as we tried (and often failed) to remember all the special rules, which might require someone to wiggle their spirit fingers over the card they just played while saying, “I love you, Madam Diet Coke. 10-4.”

Even a “plumbing emergency” at the house that shut off our water for two hours one evening couldn’t put a damper on the fun. In fact, despite the lack of water, no one in the group stopped doing what they were doing. The dinner crew kept things cookin' to deliver mac and cheese, chili, and BBQ chicken. Board gamers still enjoyed snacks and beverages… although perhaps with a little extra moderation, since the bathrooms were off-limits. People even still enjoyed the outdoor hot tub.

DMC Directors and DMSki veterans, Jesse and Tim, made sure the late-night party crowd at the house had enough to eat by baking up batches of garlic bread and cookies all Saturday night. We were happy for more snacks after three tough days of skiing.

Farewells and Flights Home

Saturday night brought in several more inches of snow, so some people soldiered on for a fourth day on the slopes. The rest of us cleaned, packed, and rubbed some aloe on our sunburned goggle lines as we bid goodbye to our friends and coworkers from almost every different DMC office. Despite returning to work on Monday feeling like I need a vacation from my vacation, I’m already looking forward to DMSki 2021!

Learn more about DMC's Company Culture. 

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The following guide walks through all the steps required to configure your Siemens project for language translations and reveals several locations that text lists may be hiding on your PLC and HMI.

Configuring Global Project Languages

The first step to adding multiple languages to your project is to configure the global project language. In your project tree, you should have a “Languages & resources” folder.

Double-clicking on “Project languages” will bring up all the available project languages. For this example, my editing and reference languages will stay in English, but I want to add Hungarian to my project.

Configuring Runtime Language (HMI)

Now that Hungarian is one of my project languages, I can add it to my HMI. In the HMI portion of the project tree, navigate to the runtime settings, and make sure all your desired languages are selected and enabled.

Exporting Project Texts

Unfortunately, there is no auto-translate feature. The next step to configuring our translations is to track down every piece of text that needs to display in the new language and give it an accurate translation. Let’s start with our HMI.

In the global “Languages & resources” folder, navigate to your project texts. Filter for just your HMI (deselect the PLC in the dropdown, then click the green arrow). While you’re at it, filter out any empty entries by clicking the filter icon on the left as well.

You could type all your translations directly into TIA Portal from this view. However, texts can also be exported as an Excel spreadsheet where they can be edited and re-imported later. Click on the export arrow.

A window will pop up that will allow you to filter your texts even more. For this project, my alarm texts all live on the PLC side, which will be exported separately. Therefore, all I need to export from the project texts is what will be displayed on the HMI.

This text list will include button text, help text, text boxes on your HMI. Make sure your source (existing) and target (desired) languages are configured before hitting export!

Faceplate Translations

If your HMI uses any faceplates that have text, these will not be included in the project texts that you just exported. First, we need to edit each faceplate to add the language configuration! I have not found a better way of doing this than going through each faceplate, adding a language, and releasing the new version.

Be sure to select the option to update all faceplate instances when you release the new one. Translations cannot be completed if any faceplates are still “in test” (unreleased).

Once all your faceplates have the correct language configuration, you can export your library texts for easy translation in Excel.

Alarm/Warning Message Translations

In my project, I am using program alarms and building the alarm message strings on the PLC. Therefore, these texts will not be included in previous text exports from the HMI project. I have four text lists on the CPU, and each one must be exported, translated, and re-imported individually.

Editing Text Lists in Excel

Editing the text lists in Excel is straightforward. Add or modify entries in your target language column, but don’t touch anything else on the spreadsheet!

Importing Text Lists

Once you complete the translation column, the next step is to import your text lists back into your project. Importing text lists may be as simple as selecting the import arrow, selecting your translated Excel sheet, and pressing “Import.”

In some cases, however, it may not be so straightforward. For instance, I got the warning message below during one of my imports, and none of my translated texts showed up:

I viewed the log file to find a bunch of warnings the internal ID of my imported texts did not match my current project. This warning was indicating that I had exported text from an older version of my project and it no longer recognized the translated file when I tried to import.

This is most likely to happen if you’ve made numerous changes to your project texts since your original export or if you’ve changed the name of your project.

My solution was to re-export all the text lists from my project so that the project data captured in the excel sheet was up-to-date. I then manually copied over the translation column from the old Excel sheet into the new one (without modifying any other columns on the spreadsheet), and it imported with no issues.

Changing Languages from the Operator Panel

Now that we have all our HMI texts translated and imported, let’s test it out! Add two buttons to a screen on your HMI with a click event to set the language. One button is for your new language and one is to switch it back to your primary language!

Compile your HMI – best to do a “Rebuild All” at this point – and download!

Learn more about our Siemens PLC Programming and HMI & SCADA services. We are Siemens Solution Partners with extensive Siemens expertise. Contact us with any questions or project inquiries. 

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Make Things Happen

Before each new hire's start date, our Human Resources team reaches out to match potential mentors with a new employee. Two mentors are selected for each new employee based on a geographic location, primary service area, recommendations from managers, and availability. Mentors are encouraged to reach out to the new employees before their start dates to ensure ample opportunities to ask questions about working at DMC, getting started at work, and even getting settled in a new city.

The DMC Admin team helps facilitate mentorship by maintaining a list of all mentor pairs and the suggested meeting frequency – based on the mentee's level of experience at DMC. Mentorship meetings usually take place over lunch. Admins also take charge of scheduling lunches between the mentee and each of their mentors. Mentees may also choose to have “ad-hoc mentors" for specific career growth questions, technology expertise, professional development, or other experience-based questions.

Traveling for work is a common occurrence in the world of automation consulting. Additionally, DMC has a wide geographic spread, so mentors and mentees may be in entirely different places. Individuals can choose to be creative about how to have their mentor “lunch" – over Skype or Slack for remote mentor pairs, and sometimes over breakfast or happy hour drinks with local pairs who have busy workday schedules!

Tell It Like It Is

DMC provides guidelines for mentorship conversation starters including, but not limited to: tricky client/project situations, new responsibilities and technical capabilities, involvement in other company initiatives and events, and suggestions for DMC. Mentees are encouraged to be candid and honest; they have the opportunity to share things they may not be comfortable sharing with their direct manager. Likewise, mentors are encouraged to listen actively and be an advocate for their mentees.

Have Fun!

In addition to providing an outlet for serious discussions, mentor lunches are also a fun way to get out of the office and build relationships between employees.

Our collaborative Sharepoint list maintains a plethora of suggestions for restaurants to try in each of DMC's cities. Or, some employees choose to blaze their own trail and take on mentor “how to drive a manual car" lessons!

Learn more about DMC's company culture.

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Activity fund outings are fun events everyone is encouraged to plan and invite other employees and their friends to and DMC helps cover the cost. Over Easter weekend, we took advantage of some exclusive Reno activities to celebrate the hard work of the engineering team in Reno during Q1 and send them out with a bang!

Last Hurrah at Harrah’s

We kicked off our weekend with goodbye dinner for DMC Boston’s Eric Baggen at Harrah’s Steakhouse in Harrah’s Casino and Hotel. Despite being a smidge underdressed in our jeans and steel-toed boots, we all indulged in the 4-course dinner with crab cake, salad, steak, and a baked Alaska dessert.

After a bar crawl around downtown, our night ended back at Harrah’s with craps, pool, and slots. We learned how to play the pass line and also that it’s very, very difficult to tell time in a casino.

Easter Eggstravaganza

Our fantastic project managers, Katherine Czaplicki and David Sestrich, also organized an Easter party for us. First, we got artsy dying some eggs!

Colorful eggs completed, we broke loose for a surprise-filled egg hunt around the house. Some of the surprises included chocolate bunnies and even a Lego kit – others weren’t so lucky and drew Smirnoff Ices (a DMC tradition). Icing requires you take a knee and down a Smirnoff as quickly as you can and usually comes as a complete surprise to the person who has been iced.

Eggshells to Bullet Shells

Hands down, the highlight of our weekend was going to Big Shot indoor shooting range. A small group of us arrived early enough to play a friendly April fool’s prank on DMC St. Louis’ Chase Hollingsead by pretending it was his bachelor party.

Chase was congratulated on his upcoming nuptials and then required to wear a ball and chain attached to his ankle while instructors debriefed us on the types of guns we would have a chance to shoot and some general safety practices.

Most of us, including myself, knew very little about guns before the trip, so we were very grateful for our instructor’s descriptions of the firearms and explanations about how they would feel when we started shooting them. We grabbed safety gear, picked out some targets, armed-up, and headed into the range.

We worked our way up in intensity from an Uzi to a Full Auto Glock to an AR15. Everyone also got a (literal) kick out of the 0.50 caliber Desert Eagle.

Finally, we got to choose one of two belt-fed machine guns (an RPD or an M249 Saw), which quickly became the overall favorites.

Of all the activity fund events I’ve gotten to experience in Reno, this one was the best bang for our buck! Check out the video below for some highlights. 

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