I’m resisting the urge to start this blog with a “Hello world” post..

An Introduction

Welcome to my blog! As the title might indicate, this is my first post.

My name is Charlie, and I’m a Software Engineer based out of San Mateo, California. Check out the about me section of this site to learn more about me!

I currently do a lot of work in the IoT space, and my formal education is in Electrical & Computer Engineering, so I quite enjoy integrating my software work with hardware and embedded / edge devices when possible.

I also have a lot of enthusiasm towards audio and music: from composition to production to the software and technology that fuels it. A fair amount of my time these days is spent working on or experimenting with music, and I try to incoprorate that into my software development whenever possible.

What to expect

To be quite honest, I don’t see myself as the most avid blogger, but it seemed like a good idea on a few levels.

  • Although more of a backend developer, I’m currently exploring the full-stack field, and a relatively simple static blog seems like a good playground for front-end work. With any luck, this website should start looking fancier with time!

  • While my job keeps me plenty busy, there are lots of skills I’d like to learn that aren’t immediately applicable to my work, so I plan on documenting any learnings here as I attempt to expand my skillset.

  • Thanks to a recent and relatively well-known global incident that I won’t bother naming, I’ve been able to alocate more time to work through my list of personal projects. As I’m doing so, it seemed worthwhile to document them somewhere.

My head’s been teeming with project ideas over the past few months, and I’m excited to start seeing these come into fruition. As they do, I’ll be posting updates here and sharing any work or findings.

My projects tend either to address immediate needs in my daily life or serve as (debatably) throwaway projects to learn and gain experience with a new skillset. My goal is to iterate on these such that their usefullness might extend to others with the same needs and maybe even act as a gateway into open source work! I’m planning on keeping my work as public as possible for anyone who might take interest, although some projects will likely require a bit of TLC for public consumption.

It’s also worth noting that I’m kind of a cheapskate when it comes to personal projects.. I don’t really like adding personal monthly expenses to projects that are arguably pointless, so I tend to search around for the free or dirt cheap solutions. I find it’s a good habit, since it’s always good to keep things cheap, even for larger or enterprise projects. This is something I’ll likely touch on more with projects when relevant!

As mentioned above, I’m relatively musical in my personal life, so I might document music projects here as well. I’ve grown to hate SoundCloud (sorry), so I’m interesting in making my own music player to host those projects here as well!

I don’t think my opinions are really too useful here, but I might find myself offering my two-cents on things from time to time, particularly regarding some of my experience thus far working in the software industry, or sharing philosophies on design and the like.

Not my first rodeo..

It’s my second rodeo, actually. It’s worth noting that this isn’t actually my first stab at a blog. I found myself documenting some of my university projects on a Wordpress site circa 2017. Check it out if you’d like to see some of the work from my time as an Electrical Computer & Engineering student! (My senior design project, in particular, was pretty neat.)

I wanted to move away from Wordpress towards something more DIY for reasons listed above, and I came across Jekyll, which this site is currently built with. Since getting setup, it’s been a pretty intuitive tool to play around with, and you can expect a post in the near future about my takeaways using it!

A conversation

I really wasn’t sure of this at the start, but then a friend of mine said something that just made all kinds of sense..

He said “think of it more as a conversation”.

I like that.