I know the homepage says that i’m a mechanical engg. student but i’m gonna be honest, I barely have an interest in the subject. I’m studying it cause that was the best i could get according to my entrance exam score. I’ve wanted to work in tech for as long as i can remember. I was nicknamed “Savy” before i was even born. It was my uncle’s wish to be named so, plus it’s gender neutral so there were no conflicts if i were a girl. I sometimes think of it as a prophecy that i have to fulfil, cause savy is not that different in pronunciation to savvy, as in tech-savvy. Plus i’ve always had a natural inclination towards tech and computers, at least that’s what my family has told me.

I started programming back in December of 2022, thanks to me not wanting to sit at home any longer¹ (i took an introductory programming course) and help from my friend, Kevin. I learned JavaScript/TypeScript and React during the summer and shipped a smol project which i made in 3-ish days. Then I ended up remaking my friend’s portfolio website cause why not. I had a pretty awesome flow imo. I thought i could maintain the flow when i start college but boy was i wrong…

As you can tell, I didn’t commit shit starting September. That was when my classes started. I had a project idea which i had to drop cause I barely had time to dedicate to anything other than my coursework. By the time the semester was over, I knew this wasn’t gonna cut it so I made up my mind to try to at least code for 30minutes a day starting next sem. It was perfect for me cause we had an introductory python programming course.

I was semi-regular in coding daily. I made serious progress with other projects that i was working on, including another website for the same friend. But life isn’t easy. Altho I was able to rake in consistency on the programming side, my academics suffered (except for the programming course ofc). To be honest, I can’t blame progrmaming for this alone, I was myself a lil carefree that semester including getting a serious crush on someone which definitely was not a good idea.

And in April, I starting playing League of Legends. I don’t think i need to explain a lot there 😅.

But last semester, we got Fluid Mechanics as a course. I’m interested in Algorithmically Generated Art², so I looked up a lil bit into fluid simulations for that before i knew we would have this course. And during the course, I learnt that one of Fluid Mechanics’ application is CFD³, which is 90% programming. I was obviously pulled into the subject because of this. So around the end of the semester, i e-mailed my professor about my interest in the same and how i could study the subject furthur. In the end, he recommended me to start learning Basilisk, which is CFD library(?) written in C. As I basically live in the terminal and i live by the code of not using one-click-to-get-it-done development tools, i have a pretty good knowledge about compiling stuff from source and basic troubleshooting. This helped me a lot cause I got the library working on my mac in a night and on my friend’s windows laptop (altho in a hacky way). This really impressed my professor and now he has some pretty high expectations from me. So, I’m learning that on the side. Now naturally, my prof is recommending and keep me up to date with internships requirements and job opportunities in CFD.

I’m super-confused about which side i should focus on. CFD is like a new freaky girl you just met, who you don’t know much about but you work together so you are somewhat stuck with her. But Tech is like your high-school sweetheart who you have planned to marry ever since you guys got serious about ur thing. Working on CFD will put me in the academia pipeline but i feel like i will have more freedom if i continue working on the tech side???

I’m so clueless on what to do now and I hope I figure it out soon…

Footnotes

1. I took two drop years cause i failed to get a good enough score for the entrance exam on my first two attempts 😵‍💫 ↩

2. It has nothing to do with AI shit. ↩

3. Computational Fluid Dyanmics ↩