Hello and welcome.
If you found this newsletter, you probably care about engineering. Maybe you are studying it. Maybe you are building something on the side. Maybe you are at the point where tutorials have stopped being enough and you want to read about someone actually working through the harder stuff.
Whatever brought you here, I am glad you are reading.
My name is Zac. I am an Electronic Engineering and Computer Science student at Aston University in Birmingham. I build at the intersection of hardware and software: embedded firmware, PCB design, IoT systems and full-stack platforms. I have one working eye, grew up in Ghana and came to engineering through a path that was not straightforward. None of that stopped me. Some of it shaped what I build.
What you will get.
Honest write-ups on what I am building and what I am learning. The interesting problems, not just the finished results. What goes wrong, what I had to read to fix it and what the experience taught me. Occasionally something personal. No filler. No recycled takes. No content written for an algorithm.
I write about hardware: PCB design, embedded systems, bare metal firmware and what datasheets actually tell you when you read them properly. I write about software: full-stack development, APIs, machine learning pipelines and how systems fit together across layers. I write about projects: everything I am building, in honest detail. And occasionally I write about the career and learning side of engineering, what studying it actually looks like and what is worth knowing before you start.
What is coming.
The next issue is about why I build. Not the technical reasons but the real ones. That is a good place to start.
After that: a 4x4x4 LED cube with 64 hand-soldered LEDs, a free Git course with 217 files and no paywall, bare metal C against hardware registers with no framework in the way, and a predictive maintenance platform built from firmware to a live machine learning dashboard.
If any of that sounds like something worth reading, stick around.
Zac
