Greetings,⌗

I am Ginger Gengar, and I am not going to reveal my true name, but I am the author of these projects and this site.

I have a few hobbies like playing board games, and watching some movies. I am also into Scuba Diving, snorkelling, swimming and generally water sports. I also enjoy fishing, and a bit of cooking I guess, though I am not going to advertise myself as a great cook. I also like taking pictures to a certain extent just to remember my good memories.

So I guess I will tell you a story how I managed to develop all of these projects. I always wanted to become an engineer because I wanted to build all sorts of useful and cool new things.

I originally became extremely invested in classical physics because I needed to model the real world theoretically. When I realized that many of the modelling that occurs in classical physics was mathematically based, I became invested in both classical physics and mathematics heavily.

At this point I was already “controlling” a large chunk of information and I just realized that there will be some kind of limitation to how many things I can remember at a GIVEN time. Although I was kind of discouraged, I decided to settle for the next best thing.

If the amount of knowledge I can control at a given time is limited, at least the knowledge I can quickly access and relearn should not be limited as such. This is the original reasoning as the start of the Knowledge Archives Project. I also learnt LaTeX to support this project.

In university, I realized very quickly that there will be limitations to analytical hand-written solutions, and numerical methods were needed to get the real answers. This forced me to transition and invest into programming.

I started with C and then learnt C++ and Python. It was very hard at first and I spent alot of sleepless nights fixing compilation errors and terminating infinite loops. Eventually I got familiar and it became much much easier. Originally I used Visual Studio for all of my programming work. Thinking back at it, I still laugh at how I used to be.

At this point I felt that I still haven’t got enough practise with C++ so I wrote the Neural Network Backpropagation Algorithm. I thought it was quick, just taking me 2 days. I was very wrong, it ended up taking 2 weeks. Many errors were produced and I learned valuable lesson on the importance of planning before implementing an algorithm.

Several important things happened when I tried writing the Neural Network backpropagtion algorithm. I tried installing a linear algebra library named eigen, and was absolutely frustrated with the non-existence of a good package manager in a Windows System. So I migrated to Ubuntu to code better and also to use the package manager to install eigen. I also migrated the Knowledge Archives project and realized I could compile LaTeX really easily on a linux machine.

The migration to Linux turned out to be a much larger thing than I originally realized. I quickly learned how to use text editors and how to use command line programs and so on. Once I got that done, I started using LaTeX for all of my major projects and assignments.

After that was completed, I really loved the entire digitization of my work and wanted to have a machine whose User Interface I’ve customized to my own needs. I envisioned a machine that could get my work done much more effectively and something that allows me to be much more productive, so I decided to migrate from Ubuntu to Arch Linux.

That was very difficult. Trying to to set-up the way down in the hardware level was challenging, but I persisted and now I have an Arch Linux set based on my own preferences. From this new computing environment, I combined alot of theoretical aerodynamic and fluid mechanics with programming and gave rise to the Steger-Warming Projects, the compression ramp project and more.

Changing to Arch Linux exposed me to the full force of the open-sourced world. Firstly I used Neovim as a text editor, and then combined it with UltiSnips to allow me to write extremely fast LaTeX representations. I was very heavily inspired by Gilles Castille and I am very thankful I stumbled upon his blog post. I still believe my hand-writing is faster than my LaTeX writing, but my LaTeX capabilities rose greatly with the integration of UltiSnips. Also I use VimTex to jump between the different sections and toggle some of the equations as needed.

At this point, I have only made system changes. I got exposed to Sympy and realized that I could cross-check alot of my assignments using Sympy. So I integrated Sympy along with Bash scripts to automate the verification of my engineering work.

I guess this is just a story of how my academic performance came to be.