I'm Gabe DiMartino — a computer engineer finishing up at Gonzaga, designing analog spiking-neuron circuits in 130 nm BiCMOS and running a 12-node neuromorphic compute cluster in my apartment. I got here from a place most engineering portfolios wouldn't expect: backstage at a theatre, watching things appear out of nothing.

This page is the long version. If you want the short version — what I'm doing right now, this week — that lives at /now.

I grew up around live theatre. Sets that rolled in on tracks, rain that fell from the rafters on cue, snow that wasn't snow, fire that wasn't fire. The audience sees magic; the people backstage see a hundred small mechanical, electrical, and human systems all running at once, mostly in the dark, mostly held together by clever people doing clever things with motors and pulleys and rope and patience. I was the kid in the wings who wanted to understand how all of it worked — not the spectacle itself, but the artistry and technical ingenuity that produced it.

Somewhere in high school I found Hacksmith Industries — the YouTube channel where a group of Canadian engineers builds working versions of fictional gadgets. Captain America's electromagnetic shield. Thor's hammer that only the worthy can lift (a fingerprint sensor, in their version). A retractable plasma "lightsaber" that's actually a controlled jet of burning gas. Their seamless blend of movie magic and real STEM resonated with me, and the thing that stuck was the quieter observation underneath the spectacle: these people are doing this from a workshop, with off-the-shelf parts and some clever circuit design. The line between "movie prop" and "real working device" is thinner than it looks.

That idea — that the line is thinner than it looks — became the thing I kept following. Early projects of my own pushed at it directly: a retractable plasma lightsaber, a to-scale alien power loader, a string of smaller builds where the goal was to take something that "shouldn't be possible" and find the version of it that was. None of those early builds was the work I'd put on a portfolio today; all of them were the reason I kept building.

Gonzaga has been the place where the early curiosity grew up into actual engineering. I started in computer engineering because it sat at the intersection I wanted — close enough to hardware to keep the workshop instincts alive, close enough to software to do useful things with them — and picked up a minor in software security because the systems I want to build are the kind that need to survive contact with reality, and reality includes the people who attack systems. Along the way the work has compounded: an EVPN/VXLAN fabric on the campus network, an identity platform serving 650+ cultural nonprofits, a senior capstone sensor board in the manufacturing queue at Itron, the neuromorphic research I'm building toward graduate study.

Now I work mostly on neuromorphic computing — building actual analog neurons in silicon, the kind that fire and integrate and leak the way biological neurons do, in circuits I can fabricate. I run a small compute cluster in my apartment to simulate networks of them. I'm writing the EDA framework I needed and couldn't find. I submitted my first paper to MWSCAS earlier this year. I'm applying to graduate programs and a handful of jobs while finishing my senior capstone — a sensor board for Itron that's currently in their manufacturing queue.

The kid backstage at the theatre and the engineer in front of a Cadence Virtuoso schematic aren't different people. They're both looking at the same thing — a hundred small systems running at once, mostly in the dark, held together by someone doing clever things with the tools at hand. The scale changed; the instinct didn't.

I keep a portfolio of what I've built, write occasionally about things I'm figuring out, and post photos of the workshop, the cluster, and the people in my life. If you want to talk about any of it, email me. I answer.