I really want to begin documenting my life, goals, work, and memories through YouTube and blogging. I’ve been wanting to make a tech blog for quite some time, but never really made a conscious effort to. That, or I would try to pick up web development, read a bit into something like Ruby on Rails, get lost, and stop caring or get busy doing something else. This blog is my attempt to rectify that, and what better a place to do it than Github pages?! I can host my own site, store my code/PCBs with version control, and pay absolutely nothing all in one place? Its the perfect solution to my needs, and Jekyll is a joy to use.
I’m an electrical engineer and techie at heart. I love designing hardware and PCBs, and dabbling in software to bring things to life. I am always trying to learn something new to build cool hardware and software applications.
My areas of interest, and thus the focus of this blog, are:
- Hardware/electronics design engineering
- Power electronics
- Embedded systems
- PCB design
- Low voltage systems
- Hacks with Arduino/Raspberry Pi
- Software engineering
- Python
- Algorithms
- Interfacing with hardware
- Data science
- Tutorials (with Github!!)
- Collaboration (start ups etc.)
- Whatever I feel like
But first, a little bit about myself. I’m an electrical engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area working for Tesla Motors. Having moved recently, I’m loving life out in the Bay. The weather is a significant improvement over Texas, and the fact that I can go hiking, surfing, AND skiing in the same day blows my mind. Public transportation that is actually worth a damn is a revelation in my life. The views are unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and to be able to walk around in Facebook/Google/Apple headquarters is awesome and inspiring. There’s an entrepreneurial energy here that is definitely absent from Houston. It feels like if you have an idea, you can find people to help you work on it and maybe make it come to fruition.
That’s not to say the Bay Area isn’t without its faults. Here are a few things that I’ve noticed:
- Rent is outrageous. Seriously, a piece of shit in San Francisco is at least $2300. You wonder why everywhere here makes >$100,000? Its because of the cost of living.
- Having a car if you’re in the city or Oakland is an expensive pain, and parking is a nightmare. If you’re lucky enough to have a complex that comes with a parking spot, you’ll pay between $100-300/mo for it, or you’re gonna have to find street parking. Speaking of parking…
- The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is evil. Deciphering the plethora of signage in some areas of the city is unnecessarily complicated. Coming from a city that never had street sweeping, it is a huge pain. Where I am in Oakland, the streets are offset so that streets in one direction only allow parking Mon/Weds/Fri and the perpendicular streets are Tues/Thurs with street sweeping between the hours of 3-5am. What this means is if you don’t have a parking spot, you need to move your car every single day to a different spot, or be ticket $66.
- State tax. Enough said.
All in all, I’m really liking this huge change in my life. California is ‘hella’ cool.