here's a litte bit more about me and why i made this site

hello world


Hi! Well thanks again for visiting my website, and thanks even more for actually reading one of my articles. I don't think I'm particularly good at writing, but it's something that's really therapeutic for me. If there's one thing I can recommend to anyone to make their life better, it's probably to start journaling once every few days. I think this website is going to be sort of like a different kind of journal- one where I can keep track of different projects I've worked on, write my thoughts on things that I'm okay with other people reading, and talk about some of the goals I'm working on right now.

I originally decided to create this site as a resume or intro or whatever it is software engineer's usually use their websites for. And I think this site serves that purpose as well, and hopefully communicates a little bit more of who I am than a resume would. Speaking of- I really am not a fan of resumes and how hiring usually goes today. What I've found to be the most important in people I'm working with is their personality, _much_ more than their technical ability. I think once ou reach a certain baseline of technical ability, you can pretty much learn anything else you need to as you go. But bringing a positive attitude to your interactions, going out of your way to help people and make them feel good, and just generally being the type of person people want to be around is so important and hard to teach someone. That's not to say that you can't learn how to be that type of person, but it's learning that comes from yourself, not from someone teaching it to you.

Anyways, now that you know a pet peeve of mine I should probably mention some things that I love to balance it out. Yin and yang, you know? As I said, I love to write. I also love to move- I fell in love with handbalancing a few years ago and haven't stopped since. Most of my training still revolves around gymnastics/bodyweight training, but for lower body I still focus on squats, deadlifts, the olympic lifts, all that. I used to olympic lift much more often, but now that my garage has shared walls, I think my neighbors would kill me if dropped weights that often.

What else? Uh.. well I cook a lot. I don't eat any dairy, sugar (outside of what naturally occurs in fruits, vegetables, etc.), or really any grain besides rice. I went a little crazy with it for a while, but now have a sense of balance. Although, I still rarely eat out- but that's mainly because I tend to like my own cooking more. My favorite food is definitely sweet potatos. Actually, the skin on my palms and bottoms of my feet has turned yellow because of all the beta-carotene I get from sweet potatoes.

Cool well I think that's a good start for my first article on here. Hopefully the next ones are a little more interesting than me just typing and seeing where it takes me. Although, I kind of like doing that, so maybe not. Who knows /shrug


public packages are cool


Sheesh, been a while since I wrote anything here. That is probably going to be the first sentence to everything I write here, considering I don't plan on doing it often.

I saw some cool websites and felt like giving mine a little bit of a touch-up, basically just to make my girlfriend think I was cool. But in reality, all I did was use someone else's package! Seriously, most people would come to this website and think "Oh cool, he programmed these little circles in the background to bounce around."

Well, no I didn't. I mean I did, in a way. But in a much bigger, more important way, I didn't. But feel free to stop right here and just continue on living your life impressed with my amazing bouncy-ball programming & design skillz.

I think most people that are in web development would recognize my background as a version of `tsParticles`. It's incredibly easy to set up, and is so configurable that you can easily (in like, less than 5 minutes) have something that probably no one else has ever done. And it looks cool as hell. And, oh yeah, it's completely free.

Like what? How many ecosystems have people working on stuff that is just _free_? I don't know of very many, and I really think it's awesome. While it's true that I work on open source software- cards on the table I do get paid to do that, so it's a little different. And maybe the folks at `tsParticles` make money and I'm just not aware how, but even if that's the case- kudos to all the open source folks out there working on stuff because it makes them happy. You're making other people happy, too, and you're probably not appreciated enough for doing so.


making it easier than ever to create powerful mobile apps quickly.

expo


Expo provides tools & services that makes building apps much easier, and doable all in Javascript rather than native languages like Objective C and Java. This means that where it used to take a huge team of engineers and designers to build an app, a lot of our users are 1-3 person dev teams and can ship an MVP in just a week.

Our team is pretty small, and I loved that because it meant that it really felt like each individual could really contribute to the company's success. Expo also encouraged autonomy- I worked remote 100% of the time and pretty much picked what I wanted to work on based on what I thought was important. This was extremely intimidating at first, since this was my first "real" job, but now I really appreciate that responsibility being thrust on me, because it forced me to learn so much.

At Expo, my main role is establishing relationships with our "higher tier" users (basically any well-known companies or teams doing something we thought was especially cool), talking to them about Expo, and trying to make sure the goals our team has lines up with what really great engineering teams need from a product like ours. Besides that, most of my time was spent doing development- front-end & back-end, writing libraries for Expo's SDK, and writing lots of documentation (both technical, and how-to guides).

I love this role because I'm able to learn so much in such a small amount of time, and I have a balance between solo-programming as well as talking with customers and users. I also handled our customer support (along with another teammmember we brought on later), which was really rewarding and insightful. You can gain a lot from hearing where your users are having trouble or are frustrated, and getting that Slack message saying "I got it to work! thank you so much" is a really nice way to wrap up your day.


gulfstream


There isn't too much to say about my 12 weeks at Gulfstream. I couldn't believe I had gotten this internship, and was so excited for it going in. Unfortunately, there's just so much regulation in the aerospace industry, and when you couple that with the fact that most aersospace manufacturers are very old companies that are somewhat set in their ways, it can be a pretty droll work environment.

I learned a lot during that summer, mostly about what kind of work I want to do and the type of place I want to work at. I wanted to work on a small and focused team, where I feel like I could touch almost every part of the product. I wanted to interact with customers. I wanted to be able to make and fix things fast, instead of spending most of my time on regulation and approval processes. None of these are satisfied at a company like Gulfstream.

That isn't to say Gulfstream is a bad company at all- I'm incredibly thankful for everything that summer taught me, it just so happens that Gulfstream isn't the right place for me.


research on carbon nanotubes at the High Performance Materials Institute.

research


While I was getting my degree in mechanical engineering, I had the opportunity to do research at the High Performance Materials Institute. The research here was pretty varied, but the team I joined focused primarily on exploring the theoretical capabilities of carbon nanotubes, as well as how to manufacture the carbon nanotubes at scale so that they actually **exhibit** those properties.

Carbon nanotubes are exactly what the name suggests- tiny (on the nano scale) tubes made of carbon. Because of how strong Carbon bonds are, these tubes have a _ridiculously_ high tensile strength (greater than that of steel) and electrical conductivity (greater than that of copper), all while being as light as paper. This all sounds great, but the problem is that these properties are only shown on the nanoscale, when you're talking about 1 carbon nanotubule. Once you try to manufacture, let's say, a sheet of this material, the tensile strength and conducitivity drop dramatically. This is because the tubes are tangled up like a plate of spaghetti, rather than all running in parallel. A lot of my time was spent on discovering methods to "align" the carbon nanotubules so that our materials could exhibit those amazing properties at scale.

What would achieving these properties in materials at scale mean in terms of applications? Most of the really exciting applications have to do with nano-technology, since that's where carbon nanotubes really shine, like nano-circuits in miniature electronics, to solar cells and bio implants. Some of the more basic applications are in using carbon nanotubes as the reinforcement in carbon-carbon composites, to use in aerospace applications like atomspheric re-entry heat shields.

[Here's a paper](https://www.nasampe.org/store/viewproduct.aspx?ID=11164029) I co-authored on this topic, in case you're interested.


economic infrastructure for the internet.

stripe


Currently (as of June 2022) I'm working as a software engineer at Stripe- a developer-focused payments company that aims to do much more (hence 'economic infrastructure for the internet'). This was a good opportunity for me to see what its like to work for a larger company, albeit one that claims to feel much more like a startup.

This job is 100% remote, as was my last job, meaning I've never had a "real" job that wasn't remote. Even though I can't picture ever NOT working remote, I think that I have a desire for having the opportunity to go into an office every once in a while. Actually, not even going into an office- just meeting & working with people that are also working on what I'm working on. Basically, a hybrid style. But not this hybrid work that some companies are doing where you're dictated to work from the office some number of days. That takes a lot of the flexibility out of remote work, and then you're missing the whole point. Ideally, you can meet up with coworkers, but you don't need to. And even more ideally, when you want to meet up with coworkers, your coworkers feel the same.


trainpal


Working at Expo, it was important for me to understand the process of shipping an app end-to-end, so I put together an app that I still use every day to track my own workouts. It's pretty simple- all the data is stored there on your device with SQLite. The main reason behind this was to get experience and exposure to App Store and Play Store credentials, submission processes, approval processes, deployment processes, etc.

If you'd like to check it out, here it is on:

- [the App Store 🍎](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trainpal/id1488235529)
- [the Play Store 🤖](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=charlie.traininglog&hl=es_VE)
