About Me – Kyle Niemiec

Oh boy, here we go! I have a lot of personality, but I have a lot of honesty and integrity as well. I am from a small village in New Mexico. I ran long distance track and cross country, and my coach secured funding for a handful of Macintosh computers that he taught some of us HTML on which sparked my interest in computers. I played for seven years in the concert band under the incredible instruction of my award-winning conductor, additionally sparking my interest in music. I grew up riding dirt bikes and playing in the woods, and my bones are made of grit.

My first career job was as a professional snowboard instructor, and I performed that job for almost a decade until it brought me to Colorado. I was a pool boy, a property maintenance technician, a repairman, and an apprentice residential electrician. I have even been handed a welding machine a few times and was given the accolade of grill-master for cookouts by my boss. Over the years, I had programmed several applications, built my own gaming PCs, and become proficient in Linux OS management out of my own ambition. This, combined with some of my electrical work, inspired me to build an optical computer, which has led to my adventure through college so far. During my time in the mountains, I aspired to be a snowboarder in the X-Games until I broke my back in 2017.

Around this time I was working at DesignInk and began attending Front Range Community College, where I studied physics and mathematics. Once I complete a two more art appreciation classes, I will have dual STEM associate degrees from that institution in those fields. I now attend CU Boulder, completing one class at a time towards an Electrical and Computer Engineering Bachelor’s degree while I work. I hope to someday complete a Master’s degree in the Photonics program, specializing in optical computing.

I now love to ride my motorcycle on warm days, practice my guitar, and work on my own programming projects at home. I own a house in Thornton that I love, and I have learned much about residential construction to perform my ambitious remodels for making the perfect home. I do most of my own work on my vehicles and am a fan of repairing my electronics when they break. I live hard, but I love harder, and I am as loyal as they come.

I identify as non-binary, and I will always seek to foster humanity in my peers. I am CodeFlower, and I am many-faceted. 🪷

My Projects (non-professional)

Discreet analysis of growth rates for use in programming periodic feeding changes

Exponential Rate Matching

As a huge fan of solving mathematical issues, I was once presented with a fun challenge from my friend, Barker, who is a scientist. He was growing cell cultures, which multiply at an exponential rate of $2^{t_{div}}$ . His problem posed to me was that he was using a machine to feed the culture glucose, and could be programmed from a linear rate of 0%-100%. The challenge was to present a model for how to program the machine to exponentially increase feeding rates with the expected cell population growth. My favorite way to describe my problem brainstorming is simply “start writing down things that are true”. I have found that even simple relationships can be quite obscure, even when they are right in front of your face. The assumptions I began with here were:

The percentage of the total cell count at any given time is $p_c(t)=\frac{c(t)}{c_{max}}$ .
The rate of food injection proportional to the cell growth and max rate is $r_{inj}(t)=p_c(t)\cdot r_{max}$ .
The volume of glucose injected into the culture at any given time is $V(t)=\int_0^tr_{inj}(t)\,\mathrm{d}t$ .

Elementary, Watson! Of course, my later assumptions included that there was a starting amount of cells greater than 1, a minimum feeding rate, and a starting volume of food. This led to having several equations with which I could solve for both a minimum feeding rate as well as a maximum feeding rate. This allowed me to create a discreet model that I plugged into an Excel sheet to provide programmable rates for the machine and sanity checks on final calculations. I hope he gets to use it at his company some day!

Bathroom Remodel

So, I’ve mentioned this house that I love. What I didn’t mention was that I took out the exterior wall of the bathroom on the first day of owning my first house, had a little bit of a breakdown about it, and reconstructed the entire thing. When we first moved in, it was apparent that the bathroom window had a leak, and tests showed small amounts of black mold spores. What was not apparent was that the frame of the wall had rotted completely through to the point that you could push through it with your shoe. It took 4 months of construction, most of which I had no prior experience in. 2 of those were without a toilet, and the rest without a shower. Using my trusty iPad, I redesigned every inch of that bathroom: I reconstructed part of the floor, built an entire wall with a window, ran my own plumbing for dual shower heads and a modern toilet, rewired the electrical outlets and installed GCFIs, installed heated flooring (which runs into the shower), poured my own concrete shower pan, cut and installed my own tile, and water and steam-proofed the entire room. The wall studs were rebuilt with treated wood, the tile grout is epoxy with glitter, there is a floating shower bench (seriously, I built it into the wall studs), I embedded a 6 inch medicine cabinet with wired-in makeup lighting into the wall, the walls are blue drywall and foam backerboard, the paint is spa paint, and I installed a Bluetooth speaker bathroom fan. Not to mention, the work is up to code. I must have saved $30k in customization doing it all myself, and it is now the perfect bathroom. Of course, I love math, so there had to be a math puzzle! If you are feeling curious, try out this word problem:

“You are laying tile on a shower floor, and you want the tile to be similar to a brick laying pattern, where the middle of one tile lines up with the edge of the tile above it. You are given the width of the shower, $W$ and the width of the tile, $W_T$ . What is $x$ , the length that you need to cut your tile to? You may ignore the grout width, $W_G$ , to simplify.”

Once again, I started writing down obvious things, but only one observation really proved useful. I defined my own single-dimension coordinate system, where the left was 0 and the right was $W$ . Place one finger at the point $x$ : if you start with the other finger at 0, then draw all the way across to $W$ , move it back the amount $x$ , then move it forward again half a tile width $\frac{W_T}{2}$ , your second finger will end up the same place as your first finger. This yields the simple equation $x=W-x+\frac{W_T}{2}$ . When you solve for $x$ , you find the width of your tile is always half of the shower width plus a quarter of a tile width. Beautiful. Simple. Never would have guessed it without math. See the pictures below for my work including the grout widths.

The state of the bathroom project at the beginning. Terrible.

My partner, my friend, and me after constructing a new wall frame.

Personal Music Theory

I love music. I played the trumpet after my grandfather and had an amazing band teacher from 6th grade through high school. We won state all 4 years of my high school career and I lettered my senior year. Now, I love playing my guitar which I have had for two decades. In 2015, I began to notice patterns in the fingerings of my guitar. I guess you could say patterns are my thing. I started documenting these in drawings and learned that all the scales are the same. Yes, the major and the minor scale are the same pattern, and if you play C major, you use the exact same notes as an A minor. I never really understood why, until I took my first calculus-based physics course in community college in 2018, and it all started to click: notes that sound good together line up the tops of their waves together. That’s why an octave is the “best” sounding combination of 2 notes, because the waves line up with every other wave peak, and it is physically impossible to have 2 closer notes. That is why we say they “sound the same” (as in low A and high A are the “same” note but they’re obviously not). From this basic understanding, so many other things began falling into place, and I learned how to transpose music and build my own chords. I learned about pattern sweeping using those special notes and the repeating patterns made so much more sense that modes of keys just fell into place. Of course, you can never practice enough to really be satisfied, but I used this knowledge to create diagrams and explanations that I could share with others, and have taught several people how to play string instruments using my home-cooked theory. Learning songs is so easy now! I don’t promise that I am good or creative, but if you ever want to jam, drop me a note. 🎵

Note Taking Practice

This isn’t as much of one particular feat that I have achieved, as much as it is an accomplishment of practice and exploration. I never took notes in high school. I didn’t need to: I could just understand and replicate. Once I got into college, things changed as my interests went past calculus 2. All of a sudden, there was a lot to memorize and it got complex really quickly. I found my note-taking skill were lacking, and I was frustrated that I was not able to recall things the same way I understood them in the moment during lectures a year or two down the road. My good ol’ reliable iPad once again has come to my rescue. I have learned to digitally organize my class notes (and more) using One Note, which preserves the beauty of my handwriting (I do a little calligraphy for fun) and allows me to make precise, well-annotated diagrams. This has come in handy during my programming career as well, and you can see some nice examples on my Camp Bow Wow page. Recently, I took an intro to quantum computing class at CU Boulder and I feel extremely satisfied in the progress I have made since the chicken scratch I started with, and I finally feel like my notes adequately reflect my understanding and effort. I look forward to using this skill for the rest of my life.

Mark Niemiec DDS

This was one of my very early projects in web design, but a great learning experience. The original design was poorly done by a company in a graphics editor, and a year or two later in browser updates, the site was falling apart at the borders. In addition, the animated graphics on the home page had been created using Adobe Flash (you remember? yeah, you remember!) which was already advised against use and would be deprecated a few short years later. In addition, adding images to the slide was complex and the values could only be changed by directly querying the database. As an additional challenge, my dad’s office held a yearly event where they would rent out the local movie theater and would allow the patients to vote on which upcoming movie they wanted to see. They wanted this to be available on the site along with their new Facebook feed, but it was not possible because the layout was hard-coded with images. Along came ambitious me, and I offered to redo their website. Using the existing theme and layout, I converted everything to a cohesive HTML body that was easily extensible with additional pages and elements. In addition, I recreated their custom Flash slider using the HTML Canvas API, which made things ultra smooth and still looks good today. The cherry on top was the miniature CMS I designed in PHP for them which allowed them to edit page content, modify the slider carousel, and enable a movie-voting feature. I’m sure I could do a much better job today, some 15 years later down the road, but it has held the test of time and shows my lifelong dedication to learning new skills to provide the best possible work that I am able to.

Wanna check out one of the first professional web projects I took on?

Propane Flow Cost

This is just a silly problem one of my friends — a blacksmith — had once on Facebook. The question posed to the world was fairly simple in prose: “If I have a quarter inch pipe and I am running 10psi of propane through it, how much will that cost per hour?” At the time, I had recently completed my first physics and chemistry courses, so I was eager to provide a solution with my newfound understanding of Bernoulli’s equation and dimensional analysis. Fortunately, the equation simplified out nicely, as the gas in the tank had no velocity, and the potential energy from the force of gravity was negligible. Solving for the velocity of the gas leaving pipe, a Google search on the price of liquid propane, and a few conversions later I gave him the answer of ≈$13/hr. He didn’t end up using the system he was designing, but I heard from others that the answer sounded about right. It’s nothing important to my life, but it serves as a reminder to me of the importance of critical thinking and comprehension. I wonder if I got it close to the correct answer. 🙃