About

Who writes this, and why

Collegica is written by one person: Behzad Samadi — a systems engineer with a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Concordia University and twenty years across robotics, controls and machine learning. He spent six years as a Senior Research Engineer at Maplesoft, working on symbolic methods and automatic code generation for automotive clients including Toyota; led the software team building autonomous vehicles and mobile robotics at AIS; ran the cloud platform behind SceneBox’s autonomous-driving and robotics data pipeline; and has taught Mechatronics and Convex Optimization as an Assistant Professor. He is the founder of Nubonetics, where that background goes into forming and managing agile engineering teams that take a prototype from idea to working proof of concept.

Collegica grew out of a realisation from 2020: that robotics could be taught entirely in a browser — Python, ROS, and a 3D simulator, no lab and no licence required. The writing itself happens first, in English and Persian, on the Mechatronics3D newsletter. Collegica is where it gets organised into a course.

What you’ll find here

Every subject starts with a problem worth solving and ends with something you can run. Robotics teaches the whole stack in simulation — Python, ROS, a 3D world that boots in a tab. Software development covers structure, dependencies, packaging, and keeping a large codebase tractable. AI is about using models as tools rather than magic — agents, protocols, and what to trust them with. Finance and aging well round it out: the financial mechanics that quietly cost people money, and a framework for planning both the money and the body for a long life. Talks and events are the same material, live.

How it’s made

The site and every slide deck are written in Markdown and rendered with Quarto. One source file becomes a reveal.js deck, a PDF, and a PowerPoint file, which is why each talk is available in all three. The whole thing is a static site — no tracking, no analytics, no third-party fonts.

Elsewhere