I never really considered starting a blog or anything until I saw one of my friends start one and I was like "huh that's pretty cool, maybe I can give that a shot" and well here we are. I also wanted to try out this dope Markdown editor in VSCode and after writing these first two sentences I can't believe I used to write raw Markdown like a primitive.

Anyways so like here's my blog! Nothing super official or anything, I'll just post random stuff occasionally, or like never, we'll see. I've learned so much from blogs similar to the one I'm trying to make and it's super cool to finally make my own. I already built a very similar project for my company so I figured it wouldn't be too tough to get something together for my website too. Well I'm actually writing this before most of the fancy blog stuff is even done yet so maybe it is harder than expected, and if so you probably won't be reading this anyways.

As you can probably tell, this is just super casual just to share my thoughts on random stuff. I'm sort of writing like how I casually talk, but with a 50% reduction in goofiness. Writing regular English is actually pretty fun and while taking a philosophy class, I sort of realized how much I come to miss it. It's a nice break from sweaty STEM classes all day and now in college, I don't always have the opportunity to dedicate tons of effort to the humanities as I did in high school. I only get like one GE/humanities class per quarter from now on, as opposed to high school where I'd be taking 2-3 humanities classes simultaneously and I guess now I'm starting to appreciate those opportunities I had in high school a lot more.

Actually back in the old days when I was in elementary school, I was actually kind of a sweaty writer. Well I was one of those general overachieving students, but I really enjoyed reading and writing. I won my school's read-a-thon twice and I remember my brothers and I maxing out our library cards borrowing books, I think it was like 50 books per library card and we actually maxxed out like two library cards a few times I think. Whenever we had journal time or writing time, I'd usually write like 5x what my teachers were expecting.

In first grade, my teacher was pregnant so we had a substitute teacher for a few months and every Monday (or maybe it was Tuesday, this was a long time ago), our homework assignment was to write a minimum two-page story so I'd go full sweat mode and write like 10-20 page stories because that's just the kind of tryhard kid I was. This kind of stuff continued throughout elementary school, but when I went to middle school, I guess I fell into the wrong group of friends (not like drugs or anything) and I became an idiot.

Well I was also an idiot a bit into high school, and everyone knew I was an idiot. One time in my freshman-year English class, we had this standardized state essay test thingy and a few months later, we got the results. I scored really well, like almost perfect or something, while most of the other vocal students didn't score as well as me. Of course, like any high schoolers, they were salty, saying stuff like "WTF Monty's an idiot how did he score better than me" (which, to be fair, they were absolutely correct) and that kind of stuff and our teacher hopped in and said something like "see look at Monty y'all think he's stupid but he scored really well" which I thought (and still do!) was absolutely hilarious. Anyways the next year I met a new friend that reverted me back to a tryhard student so people can't call me stupid anymore.

I took a ton of AP reading/writing classes since my school didn't offer too many cool AP STEM classes and I guess my writing continued to improve. I typically scored really high on essays and stuff at school, college, and on standardized tests which actually really surprised me. Maybe my 20-page stories in first grade were finally paying off!

I also think it's cool that all my work is sort of like a time capsule too, with tangible records as opposed to my memory which may not be as permanent and consistent. I read somewhere that memories are actually some sequence of neurons firing off and everytime we recollect a memory, that sequence actually gets mutated a bit, and so does that memory. Basically, the more we recollect a memory, the less true that memory becomes. I'm not a scientist or anything so don't quote me on that, but the preservation of I guess myself and my ideas is something that I value a bit but don't get to exercise too much.

Come to think of it, it's not common that I genuinely express my ideas and thoughts that can be captured in their entirety. When I write for school for example, my ideas get filtered and transformed in such a manner to complete an assignment and earn a good grade. When I express my ideas in a technical context, like when writing code or designing a PCB for example, only the results of my thought process really get captured in my work, not as much the creativity that happens behind the scenes in my head. I mean I write comments and commit messages, but those don't nearly capture everything that went on in my head and they're not really supposed to.

I guess that's why I value a time capsule that captures the core of who I am, that's not something that's easily available. Well that and I can look back at myself in 50 years and see how much of an idiot I was with tangible evidence.

I'm also starting this stuff over winter break where I pour like 10+ hours a day into my projects because I really enjoy coding and stuff. After a few hours, sometimes it's nice to take a break and change up my train of thought and work on regular English stuff.

If you Google "why I started a blog" or something similar, you'll find a ton of posts about "writing being cathartic" and stuff like that and I guess that applies to me, but I'm not as intentional on that. Anyways you can sort of just copy and paste those other blog posts here and they would probably also apply to me, so I'll just save us both the time and continue onto other stuff.

I also think a blog is a cool way to capture and log some of my projects. I don't really work on Suild stuff anymore, so my projects moving forward will probably just be random stuff that interests me. I hope to document sort of what/why/how I did things and my thought process behind those, but also things that I try but don't work. In engineering, we often see the final product, not too much all the "learning opportunities"/mistakes/failures that happen behind the scenes so I think it would be cool to explore that a bit. Even the best engineers are human and will never be perfect.

I also hear that hiring managers are also interested in that this of stuff, so that sounds like a win-win to me.

At the moment, I have two projects slated that I plan to write about. First is this blog, even though it's attached to my website it's sort of a brand new project and maybe it can be helpful to people looking to build blogs in React.

I'm also designing my own buck converter. I don't have a name for it, so I just smack "epic" in front of what I'm building and call it a day, so my buck converter is just called "Epic Buck Converter". That name always cracks me up so when interviewers ask me "oh, so tell me about this 'Epic Buck Converter' project you have here" I'm always trying to hold in my laughter from that stupid name. I haven't taken a dedicated power electronics class yet or even the cool classes like controls or analog electronics, so a lot of my buck converter design is based on my previous experience, stuff I find online, and nagging professor Taufik (the power electronics professor at Cal Poly). I think that will provide a cool insight on things and it should be more investigative so I can document my findings like a scientist.

Do a quick Google search for "how to get a software engineering internship" and "how to get an electrical engineering internship". For software engineers (SWE), there are tons of blog posts and massive online communities that are super helpful and offer tons of advice, insight, and support in navigating SWE as a career. We have very little of that for electrical/hardware engineers. That basically summarizes my motivation for my plans to detail my internship/job experience. For the longest time in middle school and high school, I had my goals set to study CS in college to become a SWE, so all those SWE blog posts about life as a SWE or how land internships and all the technical stuff etc have been super helpful to me and it sucks that those resources aren't available for other disciplines. I think I have some helpful insights to share since I'm sort of a sweat when it comes to internships. In my experience, there isn't that same sense of rigor and achievement for EE students compared to SWE/CS students when it comes to the the job hunt.

I have plans for posts to detail my search experience and advice on how to land electrical engineering internships. A lot of the major points are very similar to SWE opportunities, but I only know that because I'm also heavily invested in the SWE side of things. For the typical EE student who wants to get ahead, but isn't involved in these communities or doesn't even know that these resources exist, these might not be entirely obvious.

I don't really have anything planned outside of these two categories, but maybe as I do more posts, other random stuff pops in my head that I decide to write about. Or maybe it's the exact opposite and I actually don't enjoy writing these, who knows!