Dave Yonkers

Dave Yonkers

Software Engineer

I'm a Michigan State grad working for Tesla full-time as a Software Engineer. My day-to-day work is mostly centered around validation, automation, and tooling infrastructure for our in-house vehicle communications architecture (you may have heard about it during the launch of the Cybertruck: Etherloop). Growing up in Michigan, I've always been fascinated by the automotive industry, and mobility technology in general—in just over 100 years humankind went from horse-drawn carriages to electric cars that drive themselves! Of course, the technology itself is fascinating, but the ease of human mobility has unlocked technological innovation across all industries.

I'm currently trying to find some hobbies outside of work, so there's not much to put on this page just yet. I do enjoy cooking (and making pizza in my Ooni pizza oven) and subsequently working out to stay in shape. In college, my sole hobby was participating in the Formula SAE team, which is now practically my day job at Tesla, so I'm trying to find something else to do outside of work itself. That's why I created this site :)

Before I joined Tesla, I interned several times with automotive suppliers, mostly Pratt Miller in the race operations team (Corvette Racing) writing tools and strategy software. I loved this, as I've always been a motorsports fan and was actually getting paid to work on race cars. However, I ultimately decided that my impact on the world would be greater if I contributed to a consumer product rather than a media product. Let's face it—even though motorsport has historically been a proving ground for cutting-edge automotive technologies, it is more of a media tool nowadays, and the hyper-specialized equipment used to outfit these million-dollar race machines has limited use in a production environment (if any). There is probably still quite a bit of bleed-over from peripheral motorsport technologies into the tools used to design production vehicles (for example: computational fluid dynamics, aerodynamics, vehicle dynamics, heat transfer simulation, etc.), and that's not to say that motorsport isn't interesting or important (I'm still a fan!), but my career interests lean towards the technologies inside of the vehicle, rather than those used to design it.

I'm not a web developer, nor do I really want to be (I find the most enjoyment when software interacts with and manipulates the physical world around us). However, I might build a thing or two and link it to this site. In the meantime, I enjoy writing, and you can find some of my thoughts over in posts.