About myself
CV
If you are a recruiter, you can download the latest version of my CV from here.
My first years
I’m Lucas Grigolato, I’m 35 years old and I’m from Argentina but currently (and, hopefully, permanently) living in The Netherlands. In 2020 I graduated from Instituto Balseiro as a Telecommunications Engineer, and I’ve been working as an Digital Design and Embedded Engineer specialized in telecommunications projects since then.
My passion for technology started as a kid. I remember being 5 or 6 years old and being completely fascinated by every device that had buttons and screens on it. But the inflection point in my life was when my mother made the great choice of buying our first desktop computer, the Acer Aspire 3000.
I remember every hardware specification of that computer:
- Pentium 1 - 133 MHz
- 32 MB RAM
- 2 GB HDD
- Windows 95
- Integrated modem
- Sound Blaster 16-bit audio board
I also have a great memory of the first time we powered it on, and my mother tried to use the mouse as a remote control.
We kept it for 12 years (1996-2008), and it helped me develop a very good intuition about how computers and software worked by breaking my Windows installation and troubleshooting it multiple times to fix it. When I got bored of playing the same games, I started analyzing every .exe file to find every hidden feature of the OS.
In some way, when I put my hands on the mouse and keyboard for the first time, my destiny became linked to engineering, and it didn’t take too long for my mother to realize that I was going to study engineering in the future, even though that future was still 10 years away. What nobody knew at the moment, not even me, was which one of the wide spectrum of engineering careers I was going to pick.
The beginning of my engineering career
After finishing secondary school in 2008 at the technical school Sagrada Familia in Casilda, Santa Fe, I started my university studies at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario in 2009. When I had to decide which degree to pick I was torn between Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, and since I wasn’t able to decide which one to start with, I decided to start with both (higher education is free/paid by taxes in national universities in Argentina). After 3 months attending classes in both programs and doing quite well in both of their first exams, I ended up dropping Computer Science and focusing on Electronic Engineering because I thought that it gave me a broader base of knowledge (and my classmates were cooler and had smaller egos).
My first couple of years as an Electronic Engineering student went quite well and smoothly, but starting in 2011, due to financial issues in my family, I had to start working as an “errand boy” for people that lived in Casilda and had to run errands in Rosario (where I was living and attending university), in order to be able to pay for rent and food. Since this job consumed my whole morning, and since most of the classes were during the morning, I wasn’t able to keep up with the pace of the degree, and I ended up slowing down my progress by a significant amount.
After one year and a half working this job, in August 2012 I got an offer to become the “IT guy” at an NGO in Rosario where my brother was also working at the time. Even though the salary wasn’t great, it was much higher compared to what I was earning at the time, and even though the working hours were longer too, they were more or less “flexible” and allowed me to go to classes as long as I could make up for the missed time. That was a great opportunity for me to become independent, and to start working in a position closer to my field of interest. Shortly after starting this job I noticed that it wasn’t going to be easy to commute twice a day between the office and the university, especially because the entire IT infrastructure that I received was falling apart and needed a lot of urgent changes. So I decided to slow down my university progress even more and spent half a year working full time to completely overhaul the NGO’s network and servers.
I learned a lot during that first period, and in 2013 I was able to gradually pick up some classes again, but the pace was still low. In September 2013 I was asked to also manage the IT infrastructure of the Chilean Consulate in Rosario in parallel, which consumed some of the hours that I had for classes. And in the beginning of 2016 I was offered to become an instructor at one of the IT training centers that were inside the NGO I was working at, which consumed even more of my time.
By the end of 2016 I noticed that every year I was trying to study more and make some progress to become an engineer, but instead each year that passed I was working more and studying less. I realized that if I wanted to finish my degree I had to change something, but I didn’t know what to do at that time. Until one day, in December 2016, a post about the Instituto Balseiro popped up on my Facebook timeline. It was an ad calling for students that wanted to apply to some of the programs they were offering for the 2017 intake. I knew a bit about the institute because in Argentina it is known to be the best institute for people studying science and they pay the students a monthly scholarship that also allows them to live on campus without the need to work or ask for money from relatives. That night a little spark lit up inside of me and pushed me to apply for the scholarship and take the exam in May 2017, but that story is much longer and it’s told in enormous detail in this section of this website.
About this webpage
Its purpose
I wanted to have a place where I could store and publicly display all the projects I’ve done, am currently doing, and plan to do in the most organized and easy-to-read way possible, without having to become a web developer. Of course, my GitHub profile was a good start, but I didn’t want to only show code without context. I also wanted to share a bit about my thinking during the decision-making process, not only for the public, but also for myself, in case I ever want to understand why I did something a certain way in the future.
Although the theme of this website will be heavily related to tech, not everything I do in my free time involves coding. I needed a place where I could also showcase my tech projects that don’t necessarily involve programming, like how I’m using Home Assistant to automate my house or how I built my home network after my girlfriend and I moved to our new house.
I also wanted a place that I could use as a project portfolio, where I can elaborate more on what I do and how I do it, without being limited to a single bullet point in a CV.
And finally, I wanted to improve my English writing skills, as English is not my native language. In the project I’m currently working on, I have the blessing of not having to write too much documentation, but that also means I might be getting rusty at it. So I want to use this website as a way to improve my technical writing skills, so that my next project doesn’t catch me off guard.
Why “Mistakes Will Be Made”?
At first, I thought about naming this site Engineering As A Hobby, I even registered the domain. But then I realized it sounded kind of lame and didn’t fully represent what I wanted to do with this space.
Perhaps it’s not the best personal brand, after all, why would anyone hire someone who openly admits they’ll make mistakes? The thing is, this webpage is meant to be my testing playground, a place where I’m allowed to make mistakes without affecting any other stakeholders. And if (or rather, when) I make mistakes here (which, as the title says, is 100% guaranteed) I’ll learn from them and hopefully won’t repeat them in the future.
When I was in university, I used to say, “the best way to learn something is to see it corrected in red on a final exam”. That idea also applies here. In the industry, there aren’t many opportunities to make errors, because mistakes there can cost a lot of money. Fortunately, that’s not the case here, so I can take advantage of that luxury to experiment and grow.
Why Jekyll?
When the idea of creating this webpage came to my mind, I started thinking about what I wanted to do with it. I had a few requirements in mind:
- It had to be modular, meaning that I could set the webpage style once and then just add posts without having to worry about formatting each one of them.
- It had to be easy to use, meaning that I could create a new post and publish it without having to become a frontend developer.
- I wanted to be able to host it for free and avoid depending on any provider that could shut down anytime without notice (I already lost some great posts that were hosted in Taringa!).
- It had to have support for Markdown and \(\LaTeX\) for math formulas.
I didn’t think something so magical existed. But after asking ChatGPT and talking to a friend, I found out that Jekyll was exactly what I was looking for, as it ticks all the boxes. And the best part is that it’s open source and free to use, and with a great community behind. It also has the ability to easily run it locally or hosted for free on GitHub Pages. Of course, this is not exactly “provider-free” as I put in the requirements, but in the remote case that GitHub doesn’t exist anymore, I’ll still have the source code locally and I’ll be able to move it to another provider or host the entire website by myself.
Now that I had the tool, I needed to learn how to use it. After a quick investigation I found that there are a ton of pre-made templates that are available for free. So, after clicking “Next page” several times, I found one that I liked, and it’s called “Minimal Mistakes”, which kind of matches the name of the webpage.
Will I use AI?
Will I use AI for this webpage and the projects I will develop? Of course! But I want to keep its use to the bare minimum.
Regarding the content of the webpage, I will illustrate my opinions about the use of AI in writing posts with an example.
Since the release of ChatGPT, every post in LinkedIn looks exactly the same: walls of text, perfectly structured, with excellent grammar and punctuation, full of bullets and short sentences, with a lot of empty lines between paragraphs and full of emojis and these “em-dashes” that I don’t even know how to insert using the keyboard, but that mysteriously started to populate the entire internet since 2023.
I refuse the idea of writing posts that sound like a clanker, I want these posts to sound like me. But at the same time I don’t want my lack of English knowledge to be an impediment in the process of transmitting my ideas, so I’ll use AI to help me with the grammar and the structure of the sentences when I don’t know how to express myself correctly.
If I use it too much for development tasks, I’m afraid that I will end up not learning anything. Asking your favorite AI agent how to do something is a beautiful shortcut that saves you a lot of time thinking and allows you to focus on getting things to work, but in the end it’s a bit similar to checking the solution to an exercise in a solution manual. And, at least for me, the only way to learn how to do something is to wrestle with problems, get frustrated while doing things the wrong way for long enough, and allow my brain to generate the necessary neural connections to install the new knowledge until I finally do it right.
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