My name is Michael, and welcome to my Almanac! I've been making things for as long as I can remember. This website is home to all of my favorite projects, creations, and ideas I feel are worth sharing.
By day, I'm a research and development engineer in a stealth-mode company in the fight against climate change. I break down problems and project requirements into manageable chunks, and then design, prototype, manufacture, assemble, test, and iterate through solutions until my team is happy with the end result. I graduated from UC Berkeley's MET program in December of 2022.
In the early pandemic, I started sharing my engineering projects with the world on my YouTube and TikTok pages. I edit videos about my original designs, interesting 3D prints, projects, and more. My content even caught the eye of the video production team at Buzzfeed, who interviewed me and shared my story as a creator with their audience.
When I first started college, I realized that the mechanical engineering student body was not a close-knit, well-connected group like I had expected. I didn't know any upperclassmen who I could look up to or ask questions to. I was frustrated by this, so I decided to help out others who were in the same boat.
I started working with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers chapter on campus, first serving as corporate relations officer and becoming president in my final year. My team started hosting more social and professional events, bringing the mechanical engineering community together in the process. We started hosting product teardown events, where students got together to eat pizza and take apart cool devices that our parents didn't let us take apart when we were younger.
In my opinion, the best way to learn is to dive into a project and apply theoretical concepts in practice. Unfortunately, engineering projects are really expensive! I was frustrated that so many students could not build awesome projects because they couldn't afford them. I decided to change this.
I started the ASME Maker Grant, an initiative to level the financial playing field for mechanical engineering students by funding project expenses. My team allocated over $10,000 to pay for student projects in mechanical engineering courses. The grant was a huge success, funding 27 student teams in its' first offering. We plan to offer the grant every semester moving forward.
I've always jumped between various different hobbies to keep myself busy. Here are all of the hobbies I've practiced, in order, starting from the very beginning:
One of my first hobbies was Origami. I started folding origami structures when I was in the third grade. First I would make simple paper animals and boxes, but I soon progressed to tessellations and multi-piece geometric structures. I learned by watching hours and hours of YouTube videos when I would get home from school.
Eventually, I took a break from Origami, and I began making duct-tape wallets and roses. I would use various colors and patterns of duct tape to make elaborate pictures, and I implemented several design features I observed in higher quality leather wallets. I would use thin plastic sheets to make ID compartments, slightly different sized templates for folding pockets to make the wallet fold naturally, and even included removable fold-out compartments to store extra credit cards. I started selling these to my friends at school, and their parents.
When I was in the fifth grade, I started speed solving Rubik's cubes. First I learned the regular 3x3 most people are familiar with, but then I picked up the 2x2, 4x4, 5x5, and many cubes of different shapes. I practiced the megaminx, pyraminx, skewb, square-one, and around 15 other twisty-puzzles. I practiced until I got my fastest solve time down to around 20 seconds, and then I took a break to learn other hobbies. I would come back to Rubik's Cubes many years later.
Once in middle school, I picked up several new hobbies. At 12, I spent hours researching card tricks and practicing my sleight-of-hand. I would walk around my school at lunch and meet new people by showing them whatever trick I was practicing.
Eventually, I got bored of this, and started learning calligraphy. I studied traditional broad-edge penwork in various styles: uncial, foundational, italic, chancery, Textualis Quadrata (14th century medieval gothic blackletter), Fraktur (17th century Renaissance gothic), and several styles of pointed pen calligraphy.
For the most part, I would write quotes that inspired me, or that I thought were interesting or funny. I sometimes wrote more time-consuming projects, like the illuminated manuscript below.
As I got more comfortable with the letterforms themselves, I started experimenting with combinations of different scripts. I began to focus on the composition and arrangement of words.
I would occasionally write phrases that I came up with.
I continued writing calligraphy for seven years, until I began college. In the meantime, I also explored painting, woodworking, metalworking, and started racing.
When I started taking more advanced math courses in high school, I discovered Desmos, an online graphing calculator. I started exploring various concepts in more detail on my own, trying to more intuitively understand how they worked. I started with physics simulations for the robots I worked on, and eventually even created a linear perspective engine. The name of my first math blog is where I came up with the idea for Michael's Almanac, way back when I was in the eleventh grade. Of course, at the time, I didn't have any idea how far I would go with it.
My old math blog is still up, and you can check it out here. I will warn that it may be difficult to navigate, but that's the reason I made this website.
When I was a senior in high school, my robotics coach invited me to go autocross racing with him. I had just gotten a Miata (2002, NB), so I decided to head to the track with him and learn how to drive it.
I went a couple more times, having a blast driving my little sports car the way it was meant to be driven. Shortly after, though, I left for college, and left my car (and racing career) behind.
When I got to college, I knew that I wanted to try something completely unlike anything I'd ever done before. I looked at dozens of clubs and teams on UC Berkeley's campus before settling on Ballroom dance. I joined Cal Ballroom, the competitive ballroom and Latin dance team on campus, where I competed for two years. I knew nothing about ballroom dance when I started out, but during my last competition, my partner and I won second and third place in our best dances.
I learned to dance the Waltz, Quickstep, Tango, Foxtrot, Viennese Waltz, Jive, Cha-Cha, Rumba, Samba, and Paso Doble, before I decided it was time for a change.
Shortly after I stopped ballroom dancing, the pandemic hit. Suddenly, I couldn't work on most of my hobbies anymore. I was forced to learn hobbies that I could practice on my own, at home, and alone. I started learning how to juggle to keep myself occupied until the Coronavirus pandemic got more manageable.
I eventually plateaued in juggling, and decided to learn some woodworking techniques. I started cutting dovetails and other wood joints, practicing my chisel work and finer detail control. I never became great at traditional woodworking, but I had just invested in a CNC router, so I let my creativity flow through computational woodworking instead.
It was around this time that I started making videos. I designed my logo specifically so that it could easily be cut out on a CNC router using a rotary tool, both negatively and positively. I tested this out with the following wood inlay, which then became my first ever video.
Since then, video production has been my primary hobby. I love to share my projects and creations with the world, and I hope you have enjoyed watching them!
It's nice to meet you. Feel free to poke around through the rest of my site, or reach out if you'd like to get in touch.
Sincerely,
Michael
