Hi all! Born from a peasant family in China with shortage of clothes and shoes, the only goal before my 30s was to “wash up muddy legs” and find a good career in the city, which I achieved by teaching myself to be a programmer. As I grew older, I found myself obligated to contribute back to the country people. In 2014 I joined a guy to start a company to develop IoT solutions for greenhouses, only to find that I knew absolutely nothing about agriculture.
In 2015 I encountered permaculture, and months later I started a mini CSA farm together with my girl friend (now wife) and my brother in law. My brother in law, while convalescing at home, would take care of a few pieces of land less than 0.5 acre in total, and my GF and I would visit him each Friday after our work, do whatever labour and adjustments needed in the weekends, and bring back vegetables for at least 5 families. The harvests were so abundant that we sold hundreds of pounds of sweat corns to 30+ more families, and countless extra eggplants, cucumbers, luffas, peppers, lettuces, etc. It encouraged me that by following basic principles and a little experience, one would be able to grow high quality, poison-free food with comparable output to “modern farming”. The farm only lasted less than 2 years due to our career changes, but I kept growing vegetables on my rooftop since then, basically covered the family’s demand except some specialities.
As promised in another thread, I’m halfway reading through the codebase. As a prototype, for sure it’s far from production grade, but I can see it has a nice architecture. Sadly my expertise is on network protocols, instead of machine learning or kinematics, but I’ll learn as much as I can to contribute to this.
I learned wireless communication in vocational school. I did fix stuff in my home from fans, rice cookers, phones, all the way up to laptops and LED TV, if they can be counted as applications of electronics, but rarely soldering.