A Mechatronics Trilogy: The Origin Story

In this episode we provide a detailed take on our journey to becoming Mechatronics engineers. We walk you through our experiences starting out as high school learners, having a blind love of technology, having to navigate and overcome all the social, financial and phycological challenges to get into the University of Cape Town, where our journey with software engineering began. We then unpack the various computer sciences courses we took, comparing the differences in the programming curriculum of Electrical Engineering vs the Computer Science departments. We further dive deep into the various software concepts we struggled with most, and provide our personal insights on how to go from being completely clueless about software concepts, to building a strong understanding of the fundamentals, which underpin our professional careers today. We also debate the disconnect between the concepts taught in academia vs the concepts actually used in industry. We end off with an overview of our theses research projects, the joys of finally building something we personally found interesting and cool.