15th Dec 2023
I recently came across a digital print shop in a mall at Greater Noida and it pleasantly triggered memories from my first job spending hours fiddling with the department plotter (large A0 printer). It’s human nature to avoid getting hurt but after going through an enlightening experience during my graduate engineer training of traveling on Punjab State Buses and checking dealer sales and service level performances, I literally felt nothing could be scarier having already overcome language and business acumen barriers.
So I started raising my hand for work I was not the best at yet. One of the first things to overcome was technical drawings and computer aided design.
From the start of deciding what do when I go to college, I side stepped architecture, since I was scared of drawings as a kid, the kind they give as assignments in school and art class, similar story with even civil engineering when a friend said they just keep drawing designs all semesters. Little did I know that in production engineering my major there would be more than 5 semester worth of drawing classes by hand of things from machine design, factory layouts and fixture designs.
In the midst of plowing through all of this, we never were taught CAD well enough and I was always more enamored by the Operations research part of my studies, pushing my professors to open up a simulations elective and doing my final year thesis on optimization problems through genetic algorithms.
So what changed ? I just stopped being scared of work I didn’t know fully about. To keep me busy for a week, my senior in my first job gave me few designs to draw from all views. I didn’t know AutoCAD had only briefly worked on Solidworks (3D modeling tool) but somehow I tinkered and finished within a day.
Edit: 22nd September 2024
Revisited this unfinished post as I saw this drawing and it triggered the same feelings again of taking pride in going from not knowing something to teaching it to others.
To think back on similar scary endeavors where it was just about saying yes to figuring shit out:
- Figuring out the flow and pressure dynamics in plumbing and piping layouts.
- Learning about working with relatively large data sets, to then helping identify gaps in government data sets.
- Taking up a role as finance guy without any prior finance experience.
- Debugging code through VSCode since my project was delayed
- Getting comfortable to run LLMs locally on my system.
- Being a father to a little human being who needs you more than they even realize.
In a sense this is another self affirmation to go try out new things, not be scared of failure and if I make any progress be sure to teach others what I learned along the way. 🚀
The Lucid Monk 