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High School Student at American School of Dubai
Building, breaking, and rebuilding things, from home servers to satellite antennas.
Hi, I'm Ethan Gotz, a junior at the American School of Dubai. I care a lot about how technology gets built and who it actually serves. I run open-source software wherever I can, and I try to be thoughtful about who gets my data and why, which is part of why you won't find me on much social media. Outside of that, most of my time goes toward a handful of leadership roles at school. I'm president of the Student IT Helpdesk and a member of the mock trial team, which I'm happy to say we won, and in 10th grade I was my advisory class's representative. I also spend a good amount of time behind a camera at school sports events, and I've gotten to attend some interesting things outside of school too, like Dubai's World Congress on Autonomous Vehicles.
SITH (Student IT Helpdesk) is a student-run organization with executive roles, advised by a teacher, in our case the head of IT. I'm president, leading a group of students through volunteering and tech support work. That's included manually logging elementary school students' iPad screentime to give teachers and parents useful information, since it took a lot of time to collect and we volunteered to help, and running weekly after-school sessions where parents can come in for tech support.
Academic Excellence Award in Geometry, Robotics, and Computer Science, plus High Honor Roll with Distinction.
One-week internship at DIFC, working directly with proptech companies. It wrapped up with a meeting with proptech executives at Majid Al Futtaim.
Helped organize a hackathon hosted at DIFC.
In 10th grade I was my advisory class's representative. I helped organize events, planned our weekly Monday gatherings, and generally looked out for my classmates.
Competed on my school's VEX Robotics team in 10th grade.
I spent a year on my school's mock trial team as a lawyer, gathering evidence, building a case, and presenting it in a mock court that followed real NYS Bar guidelines. We won.
⤢ View galleryI set up an antenna on my roof to pull down live imagery from geostationary weather satellites over HRIT RF. Getting the initial setup working took over 24 hours of troubleshooting and adjustments spread across about two weeks, and I've kept tweaking it since. It's genuinely one of the most fun things I've built, and it's what got me interested in getting a HAM radio license. I wrote up how I did it in a blog post on rtl-sdr.com and open-sourced the ground station code. You can see the live imagery at sat.minortom.com, which ties into my next project.
⤢ View galleryI have always been a fan of how things work, especially in the digital world, this inspired me to start a homelab or a homeserver which I host websites and tools for me and other people, such as Jellyfin for my media library and the satellite website I mentioned earlier. I learned about sysadmin and production environments among other things during this ongoing project.
⤢ View galleryI have always cared about the items and tools I interact with on a daily basis, one of these things is my keyboard. As soon as I learned that I could make my own, I got to it. I programmed the matrix myself in QMK without using AI, which taught me a lot, along with flashing the microcontrollers. I designed 3 PCBs in KiCad and had them manufactured, then soldered everything together to make my own keyboards. My first keyboard was entirely handwired and placed in a 3d printed case.
⤢ View galleryI love making and tinkering with all sorts of things, this eventually led me to resin printing, a more hands on version a regular extrusion based 3d printing which instead uses stereolithography to cure <0.01 mm thick layers of resin to produce high quality models. I mostly use it to make memorabilia for things I like and cool geometric objects, and I'm currently working on my airbrushing and painting to finish them off, which has been a good way to keep growing my skill set.
⤢ View galleryDesigned and built a functional prototype for RotomShop, an idea I had for a Pokemon card storefront in Dubai. I had a supplier lined up and the storefront built, but ultimately decided not to launch it. Even so, I learned a lot along the way about how stores actually run, things like inventory and operations through Odoo, team management, and the finance and legal side of things.
⤢ View galleryBuilt a Flask-based tool that strips DRM from Apple Music tracks and converts them to FLAC, handling metadata tagging automatically along the way. The code is up on GitHub.
I love music and maintain a large 10,000+ FLAC library of all sorts of albums, most of which are CD or Vinyl rips. Building it out has gotten me into online communities built around music preservation and curation, which has taught me a lot about audio quality, metadata, and how much care goes into archiving music properly. I listen to it all through Navidrome.
While I technically do not have my license yet, I am currently in the process of getting my HAM radio license after which I will use VHF for 6 months until I can upgrade to HF and chase DXCC.
While I don't always have the time to play games, I do enjoy many video games, some of my favorite include 1000xRESIST, Alan Wake II, and Control.
I am a big fan of movies and shows and I have a ginormous watchlist ahead of me. I watch most of it on my projector, which makes even a mediocre movie feel like an event. My favorite director is David Lynch.
I really enjoy learning, any topic will engage me. I enjoy educational youtube content by channels like SciShow and AlphaPhoenix that make me wonder about the world, and inspire me to learn new hobbies and skills. Most of my hobbies start this way, I get absorbed into something new, join whatever community exists around it, and eventually move on to the next thing once I've learned what I wanted to. I think my biggest strength is that I can really commit to something and get it done, but that same focus can turn into tunnel vision, so it's probably my biggest weakness too.
I've always been interested in art and abstract portrayal. I shot a bit before 9th grade, but a photography class that year is really what kicked things off, it taught me the fundamentals I still use. I shoot on a Lumix DMC-GX8 that was passed down from my dad.
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