About

Engineering is my passion and as such, I happily devote a lot of my time to my studies and to personal side projects. However, when I’m not doing anything engineering related, I love analog photography which pairs perfectly with my other extracurricular interests: traveling, birdwatching and bird photography. I also have a group of friends with whom I produce music and this, along with photography, serve as my creative outlets. In both cases, I love the process of creating something from scratch. I enjoy each step which transforms the picture or the track and I spend my days thinking about different combinations of processes that might yield something nobody has created before. Cooking is something I picked up recently, and in a similar way to photography and music, the transformation processes in gastronomy fascinate me. I’m planning to explore cheese and sausage making to further experiment with food transformation.

Also worth mentioning about myself is my passion for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and birds. FOSS is something usually associated with software professionals of some kind who appear to have complete mastery over the operating system stemming from their education. As someone from a different engineering field, I have had different but greatly rewarding journey with FOSS. I started using void-linux as my main operating system during the summer of 2021. I learnt a lot just from configuring the system and installing basic programs. Over the years, I have become increasingly more comfortable finding, installing and using FOSS. Things that seemed almost supernatural like compiling software from source have become familiar and every year I find myself depending on less and less proprietary programs. Something that I particularly love about FOSS is the idea of becoming an active user in the products and services that you use, helping them to improve for oneself and others. Contributing meaningfully to open source projects has been a goal of mine for a long time. I still need to improve and the complexity of some of my predilect projects (like OpenFOAM or KiCad) is quite intimidating. However, I am confident that each year that passes I’m closer to achieving this goal and a couple of weeks ago I uploaded my first serious open source project.

Living and studying in West Auckland for a handful of years, I had privileged access to all of the west coast beaches in the Auckland region. Amongst them, a beach called Muriwai stood out the most to me. This is home to one of the only Australasian gannet colonies on land in the world. It did not take many visits for me to become obsessed with these birds. I remember developing a profound jealousy over my inability to fly, and to fly as gracefully as they did. It was clear to me at this point that I wanted to study aeronautical engineering. Since then, birds have never ceased to amaze me. I began bird watching and when film photography came into my life, the very complex problem of analog bird photography started making the rounds in my head. I still have not figured out a consistent approach, and unfortunately, my main camera broke down recently. However, I am excited to start trying again soon.