by tossaway_1Ys46 | 2025-06-30 11:25:28+00:00
Personally?

Finding work opportunities which enable me to grow in my personal interests (material science, physical chemistry, applied physics, additive manufacturing). I feel compelled to support scientific research, such as material informatics - or maybe automating labs with robotics.

It would be thrilling to manage infrastructure for scientific computing workloads (as an idea).

Honestly, the tech stack + role matters far less than to me than what we're doing, and who I'm doing it with. I'm motivated by curiosity and the desire to learn. I am tired of reading scientific literature solo with nowhere to apply the knowledge, except personal engineering projects in my workshop by myself. I am not an academic, just a full-stack/polyglot software engineer. In the last 3 years my interest in this stuff just exploded.

Additive manufacturing is another field that I'm very interested in, and would love to work in.

10 days ago I ended a 2.5 year relationship which was not healthy for me to be in. I'm recovering physically from chronic stress. Everyday is getting better.

Planning to move to another country soon. Currently I'm in a non-EU country in Europe. I would be very interested to live in Germany, but am open to other possibilities - the work opportunity would be the driving factor. I'm a US citizen, 38 years old. There are (seemingly) no communities and resources for me to grow my personal interests here. The country is falling apart due to an extremely corrupt government.

Technically?

Been using agentic coding tools the past 7 months.

Recently, I built a slicer for a clay paste extrusion 3d printer (which I built for fun). It aims to generate a continuous toolpath (including between layers) that does not self-intersect, from an STL model. Stress tested it with complex geometries.

The slicer involved a lot of computational geometry solutions. Despite my graphics programming experience, it would not have been possible for me to build this without the help of LLMs, and more crucially - access to publications from research groups dedicated to this space. Reading literature about toolpath planning for industrial robotics was thrilling.

I learned a lot about how to do R+D in a somewhat unfamiliar domain. Feels like I pushed the limits of what's possible with LLM coding on this project, after trying many workflows, models, and techniques. Will be posting some insights on my soon-to-be-released blog soon.

It was a whole lot of fun implementing a zillion approaches to solve this problem, and seeing the results quickly visualized with matplotlib. If anyone's interested, I can share some images here.

I'm also building a PKM (personal knowledge management) system based on a graph db that helps me keep up with all the research + projects + daily activities in my digital life. I've been an org-mode + emacs user for 8 years, and it's just become increasingly obvious to me that I need something more powerful. Trying to coerce a relational db to support multiple inheritance w/labeled nodes + edges, while getting normalized tables is not pretty, and all the join tables will cause performance hits. This project is the definition of scope creep, but it's a personal project, so I'm okay with it.

Documentation and logs of many past/current projects are going up on my soon-to-be released blog soon. I've written many draft posts, and it's already deployed. By next month I expect to be able to show everything that I've mentioned here. There are some repositories if anyone is interested in previews of anything mentioned.

Socially?

I'm trying to be more open and transparent online - to reach out and find people who I could talk with about shared interests, and potentially build something together.

Hacker News has been a consistent source of inspiration in my life since I discovered it in 2012, and I want to start contributing to the discussions and inspiring people in any way that I can. I've been a lurker for far too long.

Can send links to my github and unfinished blog (with drafts for some past projects and more about future projects + topics of interest), if anyone reaches out. Next month I intend to be posting many links, and to use my "real" username. Just don't want LLMs scraping the personal bits of this post.