Irfan Habeeb

"That's one of the remarkable things about life. It's never so bad that it can't get worse" - Calvin & Hobbes

Born and bought up in a countryside of India. Had an amazing childhood with lots of friends and pets. Enthusiastic about most aspects of engineering and stand-up comedy. Met and married my other half and loving the roller coster ride ever since.

Parents wanted me to become a doctor, but I preferred engineering. Came up with a loop hole and did a PhD in mechanical engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to become a doctor. Completed bachelors and masters in Aerospace engineering at IIT Madras, India. Worked as a software engineer for a year only to realise how bad life can get.

Now, living in Germany with family, working as a development engineer, and trying out the vast selection of German beers.

Articles

The following are a few of the topics that I found interesting.

ChatGPT - Offline alternatives

Offline alternatives of ChatGPT and similar NLP tools.

Freeware for Engineers

An overview of some CAE engineering tools, both free and paid.

Interests & Expertise

Electric motor design

Currently I am working with the design and development of mechanical aspects of Electric motors.

Structural mechanics

Structural and thermal aspects of materials under various conditions using theoretical and practical approaches.

Materials & Fracture

Theoretical and practical experience with several kinds of materials.

Programming

Started out of interest and now speaks Python fluently along with 3 - 4 other languages.

Machine learning

Beginner, done a few courses and projects. This is a nice hobby as well.

Image processing

It combines many of my interests together; mainly programming, robotics and machine learning.

R/C aircrafts

It was the best way to earn pocket money during my Masters, while learning engineering fundamentals.

Cooking

I can cook indian dishes decently and indian versions of some Spanish and Italian dishes reasonably well.

Tools and codes

Over the years in both academia and industry, I have developed a number of tools for a variety of engineering applications (Github).

Material models

Various numerical models to examine material properties using FEA under different environmental conditions.

Crack detection

Matlab code to detect the crack in an image an image. Also able to find displacement fields and associated fracture properties.

Fracture analysis

Different kinds of damage models depending on the material and the dependency of loading conditions.

Tools for FEA analysis

Codes to automate, extract and examine the FEA simulation data. Focus on Abaqus simulations.

About me

This is the timeline of major events in my life. If you are looking for a formal version, here you go.

Year Event
1991 Born.
1992 Started walking, biting and talking - mostly monosyllables.
1996 Started 1st standard at school.
1997 Failed 1st standard in school and repeated. Gained a better understanding of preliminary education.
2007 Completed 10th standard. Blended in with the crowd as an average student.
2010 Joined for Bachelors at IIT Madras. Felt like an adult, enjoyed the freedom and learnt engineering at leisure.
2013 Started to question religion.
2014 Masters, started earning pocket money by conducting workshops.
2015 First job, worked as a software developer, understood that adult life sucks.
2016 Quit job, went to Israel, started PhD along with drinking and other activities.
2016 Took flight for the first time, went to Europe only with 100 Euro and survived.
2017 Traveled all over Europe under the name of collaborations.
2018 Traveled too much, ran out of passport pages and got a new one.
2019 Found a human who could tolerate me and tricked her into marriage.
2020 Covid started. Learned to live without human interaction, realised that it is not essential.
2020 Went to the US, spent time with family.
2021 Graduated PhD, started looking for a job while having existential crisis.
2021 Wife started Postdoc in Max Planck, went to Germany with her.
2022 Currently working as a development engineer while learning German.

Favourite quotes

  • "You don't need everyone to like you. OK?" - wife
  • "Reading someone's code is like using a public toilet" - Prof. Sivashambu Mahesh
  • "To me this is not yelling, I am not yelling. I'm just passionate about my opinions and I want to tell you all of them before you start talking again" - Bill Burr
  • "Love is like taking a dump. Sometimes it works itself out. But sometimes you need to give it a nice hard slimy push"- Eric Cartman
  • "Cool like a fool in a swimming pool" - Timmy
  • "If you stare into the abyss long enough the abyss stares back at you" - Nietzsche
  • "No matter where you go, people will always find some kind of way to get high. We have to. The pain of existence is too much" - Sunny Side