We Have Liftoff!

Hi! Hello! Howdy! And Ishnu-alah! Welcome to my blog dear reader! I'm stoked to finally have a website of my own up and running. Here's a complimentary post explaining a little bit about who I am and what I am doing.

I Suck at Web Development

I will be completely honest and admit that creating this place almost killed me as I haven't touched HTML/CSS since I was a sophomore in high school. In fact, this is actually the second iteration of this website. If you managed to see how the first one I wrote ended up looking like — no you didn't.

If you care about the nerdy details, I built this using Eleventy (11ty) which runs on JavaScript but permits you to choose from different templating languages. Personally, I'm pairing it with Nunjucks, Markdown, and vanilla CSS. I found it the easiest static site generator to pick up for a beginner such as myself, compared to the alternatives.

My obsession with Dieter Rams and European modernism at the time of writing pushed me toward a more minimalistic style choice (maybe it's the same affliction that causes academics to be attracted to pure HTML sites — I'm not quite sure). The Tiny Brutalist CSS framework by pruger provided a component library that was a perfect fit for my needs.

To wrap everything up under a pretty bow, I opted to use Netlify for hosting and deploying my website. To be honest, there is not much to say about why I chose this tool. My website is pretty basic and it would be okay for most options out there. But like I said before, if you care about nerd stuff, now you know.

Website Artwork

While this website is mainly barebones, I did try to squeeze in a few pieces of artwork for more flavor. The logo in the leftmost corner was comissioned by one of my favorite artists SCJREAL. It represents the logo for my own personal maker pseudonym "PhaseFive Electronics". They did a fantastic job with the design and branding and I'm very happy with how it turned out!

I designed the favicon myself. It’s supposed to be a dispersive prism, which is something I’ve always thought looked pretty cool on its own, not to mention how well it aligns with my areas of study. I plan to add a lot of custom art pieces here in the future in the form of easter eggs, so be on the lookout for that.

Alright, What's All This Then?

At the time of writing, I am an electrical engineer by trade working in the space industry. However, I didn't actually follow the most direct path into the field. I was originally set on pursuing illustration, but I decided to apply to undergraduate computer science programs at the last minute because they seemed more practical.

In college, I eventually realized I preferred hands-on work and became more interested in hardware and physics, so I switched my major to electrical engineering. Not long after, I landed a six-month internship at an aerospace research division within an FFRDC, where I was exposed to mind-blowing projects. From there, I fell in love with spacecraft technologies and the rest was history.

While there's so much to explore, as of now, my interests primarily lie within these topics:

For better or for worse, I haven't been one to share my thoughts and creations online. Now that I have more time, I want to commit to self-learning, and I’d like to return to graduate school one day, ideally for optics or electromagnetics so I can work on sensors. My dream goal would be to work on payloads for deep space missions however, I am also a huge fan of atomic stuff and can see myself working on nuclear instruments.

What I want most from this website is a way to monitor my growth over time or in other words, somewhere to post things I find cool online in hopes of becoming an open source-or-er.

Thanks for Reading!

I see you've made it to the end without falling asleep. There's probably more that I can say to paint a fuller picture of myself but I'm stopping here because at this point I am failing to form cohesive thoughts. Feel free to take a look around. There's more to come in the future!