Maxmillian Mwenda
Mechatronics Engineer & Product Design Specialist
Mechatronics Engineer with expertise in product design, prototyping, and manufacturing. Founder of BaLora, previously PDM Technology Success Specialist at Autodesk Foundation.
About Maxmillian Mwenda
Focus
📚 Education Contributions
Making Better Engineering Decisions
Learn practical decision-making tools for engineers: decision matrices, trade-off analysis, premortems, checklists, and frameworks for knowing when a decision is reversible. Includes lessons from NASA on what happens when decision-making breaks down.
Published: March 9, 2026
Debugging as Scientific Reasoning
Treat debugging as the scientific method applied to code and hardware. Learn hypothesis-driven debugging, binary search techniques, and how to avoid common reasoning traps that waste hours.
Published: March 8, 2026
Correlation, Causation, and Evidence
Learn to distinguish correlation from causation, recognize confounding variables, understand controlled experiments, and evaluate the strength of evidence. Stop confusing 'it happened after' with 'it happened because of.'
Published: March 7, 2026
Estimation, Uncertainty, and Confidence
Learn Fermi estimation, error propagation, significant figures, and confidence intervals. Build the habit of asking 'how sure are you?' about every number you encounter in engineering.
Published: March 6, 2026
How to Lie with Charts and Data
Learn how data visualizations can mislead through truncated axes, cherry-picked time windows, misleading scales, 3D pie charts, dual y-axes, pictogram abuse, and Simpson's paradox. Then learn how to present your own data honestly and clearly.
Published: March 5, 2026
Statistics Done Wrong
Common statistical errors that engineers and researchers make when interpreting test results, experimental data, and research papers. P-value misinterpretation, p-hacking, small sample sizes, overfitting, confounding variables, base rate neglect, and the multiple comparisons problem.
Published: March 4, 2026
Cognitive Biases in Engineering Decisions
Explore the cognitive biases that most commonly affect engineering decisions. Confirmation bias, survivorship bias, sunk cost fallacy, Dunning-Kruger effect, hindsight bias, bandwagon effect, anchoring, and availability heuristic, each illustrated with real engineering examples including NASA case studies.
Published: March 3, 2026
Logical Fallacies in Technical Arguments
A field guide to the logical fallacies that show up most often in engineering contexts. Each fallacy includes a definition, an engineering example, and a practical countermeasure. Drawn from Bennett's Logically Fallacious and adapted for code reviews, design meetings, and technical debates.
Published: March 2, 2026
How Your Brain Tricks You
Explore System 1 and System 2 thinking from Daniel Kahneman's research. Learn when engineering intuition helps, when it misleads, and how anchoring, availability heuristic, and substitution affect debugging, estimation, and technical decisions.
Published: March 1, 2026
📝 Blog Posts
Balora Lamp Shades: Where Engineering Meets Elegant Design
Exploring the careful design and engineering behind Balora elegant lamp shade collection
Published: January 1, 2026