About

What is this website?

The purpose of this website/blog, as the name suggests, is to record a history of projects, experiences, ideas, and really anything else. The content will span more than just engineering projects. I want this to be a platform for me to share all of my creations, from photography to thoughts about current events to discussion about life experiences. For me personally, I want to document these so that I can see how my projects and thought process evolve with my experience over time. I’m also sharing all of these publicly to give back to the open-source community - to hopefully allow people to build bigger and better things from what I have created.

Who am I?

TL;DR My name is Swapnil Pande, I’m an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University (Class of 2020) studying mechanical engineering and computer science. My current area of interest is robotics and autonomy research for mobile robotics. But I also really enjoy rockets, airplanes, cars, machine learning, and sofware design, to list a few. Outside of engineering, I love photography, am currently learning guitar, and dance on the Vanderbilt BhangraDores, an Indian dance team. (Is this too long for a TL;DR?)

My interest in these fields started around second grade, when my parents bought me a Lego Robotics Set. Just like most other kids, I loved playing with Legos, building little creations. But when I saw these Legos come to life, doing the things I had programmed the motors and sensors to do, I was completely hooked.

Most of my engineering experience comes from projects related to robotics. Some projects are for the various robotics teams that I was on - like building for autonomous capability for a robot competing in the NASA Robotic Mining Competition. Others are completely independent, just for random ideas that popped up in my head. The common thread for most of them was that I was usually in way over my head. But I always get a thrill in tackling problems that I have no idea how to solve, in finding new technologies and learning new skills to satisfy a need or solve a new type of problem.

While my experience stems from robotics, I can’t say that it is definitively my favorite area of engineering. I think it’s more accurate to say that I enjoy design in general. The process of creation itself, whether it’s robots, rockets, software packages, or circuit boards, is really what gets me excited.

I want to apply my curiosity and love for design to solve bigger and bigger problems. Long-term, my goal is to develop solutions to problems that have a significant impact on peoples’ lives, regardless of what form or field that may be in. The ability to make a difference in people’s lives, to solve problems plaguing society, is what keeps me motivated to keep dreaming and growing.

Why am I making this?

My inspiration for building this website was not a “Eureka!” moment, but more of a slow sustained growth. There were many small factors that snowballed into this concept.

One of the first factors was my growing interest in photography. I wanted to find a platform to share the moments that I capture, but in a more organized fashion than what popular platforms like Instagram allow. I also wasn’t looking for a huge social network following, just a way to get them out there and publish them. I had seen plenty of outstanding photography portfolio websites and figured that would be a great place to start.

The next source of inspiration for this website was my rather surprising enjoyment of clean and organized documentation. My mentors have always stressed the importance for good documentation for all of my projects. But as every young, unexperienced engineer does, I glossed over documentation early on, passing an occasional two word comment as “enough”. As my projects became increasingly involved, with hundreds of lines of pythonic code or complex CAD assemblies, I learned the value of clear and descriptive comments the hard way. So I started building documentation for my larger, more-involved projects out of necessity, but I actually started to enjoy it. It was rewardings in a strange sense, to create organization and structure and it helped significantly boost my productivity. So as my excitement grew, the next natural step to create a centralized location to organize all of my projects.

As my projects became more organized, I started to realize that other people could find value in them. I have been using open-source packages for as long as I can remember, but this is the first time where I felt I could contribute back to the open-source communtiy. Instead of letting my weeks of work go to waste as these projects slowly get lost in my terabytes of data, I decided that I should explain them clearly so that others can use them, learn from them, and build on them. While github does this well already, I wanted a more generalized platform - one that would house projects beyond just my code repositories.

And with all of those factors, this website was born. Another factor that I hadn’t already mentioned was my love to dive into a new project, no matter how experienced I am in the field, and just work on it until it’s complete. So once the seed to build the website was planted (actually because I found that namecheap is offering free domains to students), I didn’t need too much of an excuse to jump into making this. I’m really excited to see where this will go and what I will learn from the process.