I have learned a lot about how to NOT make things by looking at designs from others, both in software and in hardware.

Agreed! I started my career as a lowly associate engineer doing product support. In this case it was reverse engineering products made by my own company, by engineers either no longer with the company or working on more important projects. My job was to fix reported problems, and often that required reverse engineering the product to figure out what was done, and maybe why it was done that particular way...

That experience has influenced my designs ever since. You have a greater empathy for product maintainability if you've had to maintain a product where maintainability wasn't a goal.

(How often I've wished the engineers that designed cars would first spent some time repairing them! Maybe then they would see the benefit of putting that bolt in an area when you can swing a wrench.)

Dennis