writing it down… for science
about
I graduated from Harvey Mudd College back in 2014 with a B.S in Engineering. Since then, I’ve served the forces of Mayfield Robotics and later Synthego wearing various mechatronics, electrical, and software hats. These days, I’m a researcher at Machine Agency by day and a Hackaday writer on some nights.
For me, engineering hasn’t come without it’s growing pains. Whether it’s the fact that some concepts don’t easily lend themselves to analogies from real life, or whether they haven’t received the treatment of a well-tackled explanation, some things just don’t make sense the first time you read/try/combust them.
I started these pages with two driving thoughts:
- tackle problems of the past with notes, links, or details on how to solve them again
- have a “home base” to collect ideas before they manage to autonomously roll themselves off my desk
As I keep growing into my “engineer” boots, these notes to myself help me get a better grip on the context of “why things work.”
Who knows? If the explanations are good enough, maybe someone else could use them too!
Websites are special in my mind because, unlike a book or research paper, a website is a living document; it can reshape itself and develop as the author grows up too! It’s also subject to continuous peer review, and that’s where you come in. For any content that lives here, I’d be honored to take your feedback if there are any places where I’m just missing the mark.
Lastly, feel free to drop me an email if these notes lead you into building something awesome!
Contact Info
joshua [at] [thiswebsitename] [dot] com
about this website
Gone are the days when documenting projects was a hard-coded html hassle. With a big hand from the Jekyll project, documenting projects has been streamlined into writing simple markdown files and dropping images into a directory. Feel free to ping me if you have any questions about the mechanics of how this site was assembled, or just check out the source. I also posted a slightly-more-detailed writeup.
Where are the rest of the notes?
Updates to this website are currently a work-in-progress, and some of the sections have been held back as they get a minor tweak in appearance. Keep checking back in the next few weeks for more content in the Notes section.
Deployment Special Thanks
An extra special thanks to Ben Chasnov for snapping the frontpage photo
About the content here
The images and written works of this website are authored by Joshua Vasquez, unless otherwise noted and linked/cited as such.
The file structure and software used to generate this website leverage several open source tools and are themselves also entirely open source. Feel free to use them as a template for your website. Just change the content.