reintroducing myself 👋 2nd year EE @ waterloo, currently a SWE at a series B fintech. free lunch, endless snacks, genuinely good work, but I want to make boards. my favorite classes have been RF and E&M. that stuff still feels like black magic to me, and I want to actually understand it. inspired by my friends @paarths_ and @anirudhbv_ce posting their inference notes, I’m spending the next 30 days going deep on signal integrity and PCB design with Eric Bogatin’s material and Phil’s Lab. I’ll post my notes every day, then build real boards and share those too. go check out their work, it’s really good. I'm a small account btw, huge reply guy. drop a comment or DM me and I’ll probably respond

Giving a shout to this account there’s some cool work he does

day 2, or honestly day 1.5 since there’s no bogatin today lol bear with me, every chapter is like 100 pages and I’m working full time plus a second job building apps switching it up with some C++ for now I wrote up pointers the way I wish someone had explained them to me in first year. I was freaking out over them in ECE 150 and didn’t do great in that class, so this is me giving them another shot before DSA next term. it covers what a pointer actually is, the syntax in plain english, and the 3 ways they go wrong (wild, dangling, memory leaks) ece.uwaterloo.ca/~a235rahm/a… on the hardware side I’ve been playing around with AI assisted PCB design using claude code. I’m making a star shaped ESP32-S3 board that plugs into my laptop over USB-C and lights up when claude code finishes a prompt it’s been fun seeing what it gets right and what I still have to catch myself I’ll post more once I’ve reviewed it properly and do some more manual work on it too. lmk if anything in the pointers article is unclear I’m trying to make it make sense for someone seeing it for the first time

Delusion is the only solution.

day 1 of my signal integrity notes is up started with the preface of bogatin’s signal and power integrity. it sums up the whole book in 11 ideas and I rewrote them in plain english on my site. my favorite is “forget ground” every signal has a return path, and you should care about it as much as the signal itself. with AI everywhere it feels nice to step away from the abstraction for a bit and actually look at the fundamentals of modern hardware. my handwritten chapter 1 notes are up too, so please bear with my handwriting lol. I’m planning to clean them up into a short set of notes anyone can glance over. coming up next: chapter 2 on time and frequency domains, what impedance actually is (it’s not just resistance), when a board actually needs 4 layers, and some c++ basics like pointers. lmk which one you want first thank you for all the support btw guys, I wouldn’t be half the person I am without my network (you guys) 🙏 ece.uwaterloo.ca/~a235rahm/a…

I aim to write really good notes btw guys!! from a beginners perspective especially ill post them all on my personal website my goodnotes as well as a written version