Hey, I'm Eswar.
I like walking into things I don't understand, staying level-headed while I figure them out, and finding that mental zone where a hard problem takes over everything.
It has been a while since I felt that last part. I'm looking for it again. I don't claim to know more than I do, and a surprising number of things below end with “not yet” or “that didn't work.”
~/something that learns
I'm trying to build something that learns—not just a thing that knows stuff.
EMUL is my attempt at a companion robot with room to develop motives of its own. The name comes from Emul in Shangri-La Frontier: usually supportive, occasionally poking the main character, and never merely part of the scenery. Watching Ron's Gone Wrong supplied the other half of the idea—a companion interesting because it can change, not because it arrived knowing everything.
The robot is meant to map its home, learn which of its behaviors get a reaction, and play with Bunny, a friend's Bichon Frise I ended up loving enough that I may have brainwashed his owner into moving closer to me.
Reality check: the software is built and tested; the robot has never run on hardware. My first 3D print was the obligatory Benchy. The top deck exists in CAD. The physical build is the next part.
~/six prizes, more friends
I went through a crypto-hackathon phase and won prizes at six of them. The builds included anonymous subscription auth with Polygon ID, a 3D-avatar NFT system, a VeChain nutrition and workout planner for underprivileged kids, and cross-chain messaging experiments.
The prizes blur together now. The people don't. I went bar hopping with complete strangers I had just met at a hackathon. At another, I befriended everyone still coding at midnight—including the security guard. Most of the friends from that period came from rooms like those.
~/campfires and first attempts
I like slow camping. In Mena, Arkansas, my friends and I cooked over a campfire and did very little—which was exactly the point. I also somehow found a campsite with genuinely neat restrooms, an underrated outdoor luxury.
The first time I cook a dish, it tends to come out really well: ratatouille from the movie, rajma coconut curry, vegetable pho. The second attempt is usually worse because confidence kicks in and I start skipping the steps I respected the first time.