Hello all,

My name is Duhncan and I am a Mechatronics/Software Engineer. My credentials are not very mature but nontheless I have graduated a Double Degree from Swinburne University here in Melbourne, Australia with a Bachelor of Engineering (with a major in Robotics and Mechatronics) and a Bachelor of Computer Science (with a major in Software Design). I have been working in the industry for over a couple of years now and look forward to progressing through my career with the years to come.

I am pretty much being your typical software/tech/engineering enthusiast trying my way at a blog to better myself at writing, reading, and sharing my knowledge and findings about what I learn about in my day to day life from an engineering perspective. I am an advocate of sharing knowledge and don’t like gatekeeping thus I have started this as an outlet for me to record all that I’ve learnt and hopefully it will help someone else in the future too. I also like the idea of tracking data/statistics over time and this blog would be a good way to see my progression over time and quickly reference old projects I’ve done.

The target audience I write to is pretty much anyone who is interested in mechatronics and software engineering. Whether you are new to this field or whether you have been in this industry for years, I value everyone’s opinions and I would like to learn as much as I can from my peers.

Me Currently

Currently my interests are pretty wide spread. My interests range from:

• Software Development/Engineering

  • Creating software solutions for everything possible.
  • I want to start making my own SaaS applications and push them to market if possible this year.

• Linux

  • I have been mostly been using Linux through WSL on Windows as I find executing code on linux is far easier and quicker than dealing with Windows and its querks. This might just be my lack of knowledge with powershell and command prompt but I have been enjoying bash and zshell on linux.

  • I have been getting more and more interested in Arch and Fedora as of recent and am looking to install one of these on my laptop so that I can code on the go although my old Dell XPS 15 is very old and the battery life is very poor lasting a total of 45 minutes.

  • For periods at a time I would dual boot Ubuntu on my laptop and main PC but generally at my workplaces, everyone has a Windows PC that they take control of so I generally keep my main PC aligned with this so that I am up to date with it.

    • Though I am wanting to move to a more permanent linux environment at home but am stuck as I still want Windows for playing games with friends. I saw a video from Chris Titus where he runs a linux environment with a VM for Windows 11 which I might explore in the near future.

• Embedded Systems

  • Connecting hardware to microcontrollers to be used by software.
  • My last cool project was a while ago but I made a sequential gear shifter and handbrake for my drift simulator which I don’t get to use enough.

• 3D Printers

  • I have an unhealthy collection of 3D printers.
  • Seeing the new Bambulab printers and what they’re capable of has made me very interested in multicolour printing but I may end up just modifying one of mine to fit.

• Home Lab and Self Hosting

  • Including networking as I tinker around with OPNsense and Pfsense for custom routers.
  • I want to continue these endeavours to make a secure and reliable home server infrastructure so that I move my reliance on google, netflix and other services to my own servers throuhg software such as immich, bitwarden, etc. I still have lots of research to do here.
  • Currently, I have a few machines running Proxmox to virtualise a few services such as portainer, homepage, truenas, home assistant and more. I’m looking to expand this and whatever I implement I will document on this blog.

• Keyboards

  • This is a more recent endeavour where I just built my own split keyboard and am absolutely loving it. It allows me to relax my posture and help me touch type much better than I previously have. Although my typing speed has taken a hit, I am slowly getting used to this split keyboard setup and feel like I will shortly smash my previous typing speed and hopefully get to the point where I can type as fast as we speak!

• Cars

  • This is one of my ongoing interests which I have been on for years. I am a big fan of older japanses cars and even have my own project car (350z) which I will probably post about in another blog specifically set up for cars although we will see how we go and what time I have throughout the years to come.
  • Just though I’d mention this for any gear heads that are out there that are in a similar boat to me.

• House renovations/Wood Working/Metal Fabrication

  • Since I have recently moved into an older house, I am also interested in DIY projects that will bring life to this old house. I am a pretty hands on person that is happy to take on any new projects but I will most likely not post about this on this blog and potentially create one with my partner as we like to do these kinda projects together.
  • In addition, since I am into cars, I have gotten into fabricating not only car related projects, but even house house related metal work such as gates. I am really fascinated by welding metal to metal and have purchased a welder with my friends so that we can all learn together.

• Gaming

  • I have been gaming for a long time now although am more so interested in competitive games. I used to be an active CS:GO player in high school working my way up near SMFC although a newer game took me over called Rocket League. I am currently at about a Grand Champ level though don’t play as much as I would like but if anyone wants to run it together, message me and we can play aha. I have also recently gotten into Deadlock but am no good at it at all so if anyone would like to show me the ropes, also feel free to hit me up to play. Other than that I occasionally play Valorant but my main go to is Rocket League and Deadlock.

All in all, I am interested in more things than I can honestly handle but I believe spreading your toes out to many environments betters your understanding and helps you gain valuable insight on how to pursue new problems / projects more thoughtfully and effectively.

Aspirations

My current aspirations at this stage of my career are to simply become a more well rounded mechatronics/software engineer where I can enhance my technical skills in a few languages so that I am comfortable moving around to different tech stacks. I aspire to be a self proclaimed neck beard that understand all low level parts of code as well as compilation so that I can progress my way into bigger and more complex projects with expertise. In addition, whilst I believe every mechatronics/software engineer should have this skill, ideally I would like to be proficient in system architecture so that I can clearly map out and lead future projects whether that be integrating new systems in pre-existing systems or starting new projects from the ground up.

In my opinion, these aspirations will allow me to better preach my moto of being tech stack or hardware agnostic when delivering projects to clients ensuring it delivers the correct requirements and user experience.

Future Plans

At current, my future plans are related to this blog and documenting or sighting any key information that I have learned in a document such as this, as formal or informal as I see fit as this is a personal blog. But my main ideal would be to to continue writing like this on a weekly basis but this may be pushed to a monthly basis depending on the size of the projects and how much time I have on my hands.

So that these posts are not so boring with me writing talking about myself, I will try to give more substance to these posts by taking on more projects and making a write up for them here on this blog. These projects will be under the topics mentioned in my interests above and I will try be as detailed as possible so that it may be helpful to others and not just a time pass.

Through this, I will start uploading any relevant information to my Github Profile and link them to the posts so that you can get all the relevant information you would need if you were to follow along or if you were interested in my setup/configuration.

Quote

As cliche as it may be, I like quotes and actually used to write a quote a day in some fancyish typography which stems back from my graphics design/ illustrator days so if I remember to, I will try and write a quote at the end of each post that will hopefully be related to whatever the blog post is about or just something interesting I found that week.

So for this week, the quote will be something generic but valid:

“A computer is like a violin.” You can imagine it making beautiful music, but you have to learn how to play it.”

- Bill Gates

Thanks for tuning in to this long post if you made it all the way through.

You will hopefully hear from me in the next coming week.

All the best and I wish everyone a Happy New Year!