About Me

Who I Am

      I’m avid software engineer who loves to make things that make people’s lives easier. I grew up on a small family farm where I learned to take things apart, break things, fix things and then try to figure out how to put them back together usually in that order. I learned to weld, braze, lathe, torch and do a lot of different things to make and fix various equipment made of metal. This is what started my passion for creating things.

Why I like Software

      I was so excited when I first discovered software because essentially everything starts out as virtual and conceptual. This means that your mistakes while prototyping don’t usually have immediate physical consequences. Since you aren’t breaking physical things that are often hard to fix, you can learn faster and more importantly build faster. If you’ve ever worked with sheet metal and a manual brake press you’d understand just how important and annoying precision can be while prototyping even the simplest of concepts. Obviously, if you are prototyping firmware then you can and often will have immediate physical consequences. Though this still isn’t as common as prototyping something like a metal park bench.
      The next best thing about software is that once you have created and perfected your software to handle all the edges cases you can imagine, you can deploy it (sometimes almost instantly) to a massive number of people hopefully optimizing a part of their lives so they can focus on more meaningful aspects of their lives like spending time with family.

Other things I love

      I enjoy pretty much every aspect of making things everything from cooking to construction to coding. My favourite thing is both trying and cooking dishes from different cultures. I view food as a gateway into multiculturalism and inclusivity; both of which I strongly believe in since I strongly believe people are just people. I find it very intriguing how a few ingredients can be combined in many different ways to create many very different outcomes. Before attempting to make a new dish at home, I prefer trying as close to the “original” dish as possible. Ideally this means trying to support the culture where the recipe is thought to have originated if possible. This can definitetly be controversial, but I try not to support restuarants opened by people after they visited somewhere and liked the food. There is definitely a line between culture appropriation and supporting multiculturalism and for me that’s when monetization is involved. My analogy for this is sharing a family recipe with a friend. It’s flattering for that friend to enjoy and share that recipe with their friends and family, but if they opened up a restuarant or a cookbook with that recipe then that feels more like theft than flattery.

Favourite Recipes

Favourite Ingredients

These are some of my favourite ingredients after learning about cooking foods from different cultures:

  • Gochujang (South Korean): Careful when you buy this as it shouldn’t contain sugar or corn syrup. It’s actually quite hard to make since it is a fermented hot sauce and manufacturers often cut corners.
  • Fish Sauce (SE Asia): Very common in Thai and Vietnamese cooking. As the linked video mentions the fewer ingredients and more expensive the better.
  • Aji Amarillo (Peruvian): I confess I have never made this from scratch and just bought this online.
  • Frank’s Hot Sauce (American): One of the few things I like in American food, but I honestly do like it quite a lot. The main reason I typically don’t like American food is because it’s often quite corporate.

      Other than making things, I also enjoy the occasional adrenaline rush and adventure from snowboarding, cycling, hiking, white water rafting, paragliding, surfing, mountain biking, and motorcycling (if you consider that a sport).

Areas Of Technical Interest

  • Security
    • Symmetric and Asymmetric Cryptography
    • Human Psychology
    • Human Sociology
    • Redundancy
    • Privacy
  • Wireless Technologies and Protocols
    • Cellular (LTE/GSM/CDMA)
    • Wireless Local Area Network (WiFi)
    • Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
    • Bluetooth Classic (BTC)
  • Data Modeling
    • Usage Patterns
  • Interactivee Data Languages
    • Thrift/Protocol Buffers/ASN.1
  • Encoding Technologies
    • Audio Encoding
    • Video Encoding
    • Certificate Encoding
    • Public Key Encoding
  • Visualizations
  • File Container Formats
  • Minimalist Design
  • Automation

Contact

Web Resume: nathangrubb.io
Email: me@nathangrubb.io