Me

Davis Cole

About

I’m just another product of the sub-generation between Millennials and Gen Z; born too early to upload my consciousness to the Metaverse, born too late to gather shrooms for my tribe, but born just in time to be a top 0.001% carbon emitter and get my job stolen by AI.

My days are spent staring into black mirrors, whether for reading, writing, watching, or interacting. The emergence of remote work has accelerated the viability of this lifestyle. If I’m not tinkering within the space of computer hardware and software, then I am likely partaking in one (or more) of the following activities:

I strive to be a good time guy who surfs the vibe in search of ethical and sustainable dopamine and serotonin. Period.

What makes me tick

I will attempt to describe my modus operandi, my driving philosophy, my reason to keep going.

I have always considered myself a do-er, someone who likes doing things. I like to evaluate myself and my progress by seeing what I am able to do now, as compared to the past. This can have different time scales; yesterday, last week, last month, last year, last decade.

I’ve had some talks with my brother about this in relation to work and our careers, and how I really put my nose to the grindstone professionally and personally. He has said to me verbatim, “You seem to value doing things more than me”. My immediate thought to this is, what is a human, if they are not doing? If one is not actively applying themselves to a particular task, then they may be in idle thought. I consider this doing. I love to sit in idle thought in slower moments of my life. I almost always complete these idle thought sessions with something of value, whether it was an internal understanding I have reached, newly found motivatino to do something, or, if I’m lucky, a good idea.

I have wondered if this is an ego thing of mine; that I am chasing satisfaction purely from making my mark on the world, regardless of the outcome of my meddling. I would like to think that I put a lot of thought into the things I care about, and that I should hold these positions strongly due to the thought and consideration put into the given topic.

I like to do because it doesn’t limit me to a single area. While most of my daylight hours are spent working in software engineering, I take small breaks to practice music, whether on guitar, trumpet, or a computer. I work on my car, since the bills will pile up if I bring it to the shop for every minor maintenance job.

I’ve just spent a lot of time thinking about life. How will I stay financially stable? Where can I save money? How do I avoid burnout? How do I keep myself happy?

The things I do are coping mechanisms for my life.

Eras

Not a Taylor Swift reference.

My Beginning

I guess we can start from the top! I was born in Alice Peck Day Hospital in Lebanon, NH around 10am, to a Filipino mother and an American father. Please prepare yourself for an exposition dump; unfortunately context matters a lot in real-life.

My Childhood

I can’t ever remember myself being bored with the world. The process of learning and collecting knowledge has always been a cherished activity. I attribute this to the wealth of almanacs, encyclopedias, dinosaur books, and fictional stories that my parents offered my brother and I growing up. We were also gently massaged (forced) to do math workbooks from a young age, so perhaps I am a product of Stockholm syndrome. Perhaps as a result, I’ve always been a technically-minded student, gravitating towards math and science for my academic interests.

While I will decide to make a career of building things in the future, my youth was often spent breaking things instead. A striking example to me comes from T-ball in Little League Baseball, when my galaxy brain thought that electrocuting my arm would juice it up and make me throw faster and further. So I naturally went down to the basement, found my OG Xbox, plugged it in, and proceeded to cut the power cable with a box cutter. Yeah. True story.

Despite this, I had an enriching and widely varied childhood, from being a LEGO Star Wars and Bionicle enthusiast, to splitting firewood with my dad, golfing the back 9 at Lake Sunapee, and glueing my eyes to Star Wars: Republic Commando, so I think I turned out okay.

High School

Noticing my abilities and interests in STEM-related fields, I found it apparent that engineering school would be a good fit. With older brother enrolled in the mechanical engineering program at the University of New Hampshire (UNH), Durham at the time, he recommended that I go there. So, despite being a three-sport varsity athlete, an all-state trumpeter, and a top 15-20% student, I forwent the stressful application process and mailed in my fee-waived application to UNH.

College

Freshman Year

Responsible Things

Having an older brother that shares your interests makes life a lot easier, as you are basically living his life – version 2.0. I got to campus early, due to my brother’s recommendation to get a work-study job in the library. He also recommmended that I get familiar with a professor as soon as I could to act as a mentor. My brother did research with Dr. Ivaylo Nedylakov to simulate cavitation events induced by hydrofoils in a water tunnel using OpenFOAM, a FOSS computational fluid dynamics simulation library.

Campus is mostly dead at this time, before the freshman influx, and a good opportunity to get lunch with a professor. And so I did, and this led to me volunteering for a senior capstone project tasked with restoring the High-speed Cavitation Tunnel (HiCaT) located in the Chase Ocean Engineering Laboratory, i.e. manual labor. However, this got me close to senior engineering students, and showed me a version of what I could do when I’m a senior.

I’ll summarize my courses based on code:

Sophomore Year

Junior Year

Senior Year

I graduated from the University of New Hampshire, Durham with a Bachelor’s of Science in Mechanical Engineering, having focused on thermo-fluids and computational fluid dynamics (CFD).

Professionally

I am a 25 year-old mechanical engineering graduate attempting to expand my software engineering abilities while simultaneously improving my Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) skills. Having recently started a position at a CAE software company, these subjects were not picked randomly. Ultimately, I would like my career to focus in either the semiconductor or renewable energy fields, where I can apply my CFD knowledge and experience.

However, much of my experience at work has guided me towards IT, cloud, and HPC interests.

To supplement my self-learning, I plan to enroll in a graduate program to earn my MS, and perhaps consider PhD studies if things turn out that way.

Update: early 2023

Despite my acceptance into Dartmouth’s MEng program to study thermo-fluids and high-performance computing, the cost of admission is too steep for me to justify the additional workload.

Update: mid 2024

Seems I will be applying to Purdue’s online MSME.

Personally

In leisure, I don’t think I’m too different from most my age. I enjoy following and participating in all manner of sports, especially basketball, cycling, and soccer. I’m an avid music fan of all genres, though most especially EDM, hip-hop (rap + R&B), and hyperpop/punk.

I’ll list some quick current artist recs for those interested:

In my younger days, I was a huge gamer, having logged thousands of hours into the Battlefield series, NBA 2K, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Destiny 1 and 2, and various other games. As greater responsiblities arise, gaming becomes more of a winding-down or social activity, rather than something to dedicate focused time and attention to, however I enjoy the following titles:

Nowadays my free time is dedicated more towards fitness and self-improvement. I recently bought a 2021 Scott Addict 10 Disc and subscribed to TrainerRoad to build my FTP and hopefully start chasing Strava KOMs. My real reason for doing this is to build an endurance fitness foundation to cycle in national parks, which typically have tough climbs. I was an all-state 400m runner in high school, but my long distance performance is pitiful, and I would like to improve my fitness.

Ideologically and philosophically, I try to keep an open mind to the infinitude of idaas out there, while simultaneously taking them with a grain of salt. This combination has labeled me as a conservative, a liberal, a centrist, and everything in between. I agree with principles presented in communism, liberalism, anarchism, and many other ideologies. In general, I try to avoid strict ideology and use my personal experience as a basis instead.

I prefer the realm of hard sciences to soft sciences, which is why I’m an engineer, but observing the polarized discourse of soft sciences like sociology, economics, politics and such frustrates me, and I wish I could do something about it. If I could, I would just be another voice in the reactionary Twitterverse so I just opt out of that. It is apparent to me that the primary issues humanity faces belong to the soft sciences, as our technology enables us to provide plenty at home and bring us to the stars.