~ ian's index

About me

Hi there! 👋

Hello! I’m Ian, a Chemical and I&C Engineer from Philadelphia. When I’m not busy trying to fight entropy’s effects on stainless steel, you can usually find me knee deep in some other nerdy nonsense.

My background 📚

I got my intial interest in tech in my senior year of high school when I took a computer science class at the suggestion of a few of my friends. Despite loving it enough to spend most of my free time on polishing up my Visual C# projects, I was still more interested in pursuing chemical engineering. In college I still used python every now and again (primarily for my numerical methods in chemical engineering course) but ultimately my interest in tech laid dormant. That is, until I did a co-op at a PVC plant.

The first day I was allowed in the plant after completing safety training, I was introduced to the plant’s Distributed Control System (DCS). From the moment I laid eyes on it, I could feel the gears in my skull start to spin and was conviced everyone there was going to ask me why smoke was coming out of my ears. A 4x7 matrix of computer monitors covered entirely in valves, pumps, meters, switches, and buttons? I could hardely contain myself. I had to learn more. 4-20mA, 3-15psi, I/Ps, positioners, actuators, I/O cards, networking it all… the list goes on. I learned so much over that co-op, I felt like I didn’t have enough space in my brain to keep it all.

The marriage of electrical work, computer science, and chemical engineering re-ignited my passion in tech. I took a course in C that taught a general overview of how computers function (because you know, *pointers &whatnot), and I started to get an interest in self hosting. I took a detour no-lifing the other CS for about a year, but that’s how I got to where I am today :)

My interests ✨

I am currently passionate about:

This website 💜

This website is powered by the Hugo static site generator, with the nbterm theme, and I added the color scheme. It mostly serves as my personal blog, where I’ll probably post mainly about computers, technology, music, video games, and whatever else I end up feeling like at the time.