The beginning

Well, not really the beginning. Started this two years ago but had to stop because I was too busy. Besides, I was in a company where a technical blog could have been a conflict of interest. Now back to a university setting, I can restart this extremely interesting activity.

I started coding for simulations in the year 2007. To some extent, the real reason was I was more or less fed up with the commercial circuit simulators. They were expensive and worse buggy. Another problem was that simulating complex circuits for long duration led to programs that ran for a long time. In a Windows setting that essentially means your computer is unusable during the simulation and sometimes need a restart after the simulations ends.

When I first started coding in C, the pain was incredible. The smallest blocks that were available in simulators had to be coded and then made into usable functions. But as the complexity of the circuits grew, I found that circuits with four or five converters would be simulated with never the fear of crashing. I could run six C programs simultaneously in independent terminals in Linux which could take hours and at the same time use my computer as if nothing was running in the background.

This led me to convert my C code to C++.  An immensely rewarding experience that finally ended with me completing my PhD. Anyway, since then I started learning Python. Python simplifies life to some extent with in-built functions. But most importantly, it is free and open source. With the rapid development taking place in Python, I thought this might be the right time to jump in.

One of the mistakes I made while coding in C/C++ was that I never documented my steps. At that time, I wasn't into blogging. Well now I am. So here goes. I am going to start coding in Python with the objective of building a circuit simulator specifically for power electronics. This blog is going to be free-flowing, so it sometimes may seem like to ramblings of a drunkard. Well I want it to be so.

So this begins this journey of a tech blog. I hope this lasts as long as I am in university as a post doctoral researcher which I hope will be for the next two years. So God save me and God save those who read this blog :)