“An autodidact with a bottomless appetite to apply proven design methods in boldly innovative ways” -Ahmer Kazi
That’s the quote I got from a friend who I asked to help with this page. It’s a great quote, but let me explain. Up until now, I have taught myself everything I know. Recently I have decided to try the formal route, and I am currently pursuing industrial design and mechanical engineering degrees at The New York City College of Technology.
For the last decade or more I have been designing and fabricating custom bicycles at my shop in Brooklyn. When the local powder coater became unreliable I taught myself how to do the powder-coating and then proceeded to build the equipment I would need to make that happen, including a sandblasting cabinet and powder-coat booth. I even designed an oven, but looking back at that design now after taking a few technical drawing classes, I’m glad I never sent any of those old designs out to the public.
I have a knack for easily picking up the skills necessary to get a job done quickly. For example, this website was set up through SSH to my Raspberry Pi 3 where I installed a LAMP stack, WordPress, and DNS updater script so that it could be served from my home network, but there’s nowhere to put that on my resume.
I have been fabricating bicycle frames for more than a decade and as a result that might not show a lot of work experience on paper. Any type of engineering work today will include some type of computer programming. I thought using this site as an example of being computer literate would be a plus.
Why am I going to school, especially since I already make bicycles and do custom fabrication work? The answer is to learn all the CAD/CAM and modeling programs that I can.
Learning the essential equations and programs to build new and more complicated things is one of the main reason I am in school. I love the idea of modeling projects first, where I can see everything work, test to see if anything might break, or if there is anywhere that I can save some weight. All of these skills are some of the best tools that I can have to work with, and I look forward to using them to their fullest potential.