To uphold our traditions in the upcoming winter break, George and I are planning to do the following challenges:
1. Solving 50 Leetcode Medium problems in a day.
2. Create a music album in a day.

P.S. Some of you might know that I am a big fan of rap. Only a few know, though, that George and I actually created a couple of songs back in our freshman year. This might sound as weird and unexpected from me, but I want to try something else than coding. Everything as usual will be streamed on my YT channel.

When out of nowhere you get two days of break

One advice that I keep hearing from Computer Science seniors and graduates is that school is important, yes, but we need to be smart about our career and future plans.

Since the start of this semester, I have been thinking of what I want to pursue in the future and whether I need to go to the industry in the first place or continue with academia since it feels safer.

For long, I have been prioritizing my studies over any other thing in life. It worked well, but I have come to a realization that this is a losing strategy.

For long, I have been making excuses not to make time for other incredible opportunities and projects that I am able to do if only I have some free time during the semester. I also realized that this is never the case. I would never be actually free if I keep this mindset.

It’s more about setting the right priorities and making the time to focus on them. It’s about removing distractions and focus on what’s actually important.

As of now, I still find myself spending all of my time for courses. This is good in terms of academics, but not smart in the long-term perspective. I have only 5 semesters left till I graduate, and I need to use them more wisely.

Is there anyone planning to do PhD in Computer Science? If yes, what area do you want to pursue?

Thanks for the amazing 52 days that I got to spend back in my hometown Fergana, Uzbekistan. Today, I am leaving to Tashkent, where I will meet with my close friend Azamhon, and then I have a plane back to Qatar. During nearly one and a half months, I have…

I got 25/100 on my first quiz for Entrepreneurship course. This hits hard LOL. Business is just not for me ig?

? Excited to Share My Experience with Summer of Code 2024

Over the course of 10 weeks, I have gained substantial experience contributing to the open-source project Adoptium by the Eclipse Foundation. Under the guidance of Stephen Walli, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, and Prof. Eduardo Feo Flushing, Associate Teaching Professor at CMU, I have learned and applied fundamental software development processes such as Agile Development and gained a deep understanding of Build Systems, Cloud Computing, and the engineering economics of Open Source Software.

Throughout this program, I have been working with a team of highly talented students: George Chkhaidze, Bel Ami Gisage Warakoze, Lujain Hasna, and Fatima Al-Kharaz. Our main task was to implement an existing deep learning model to help Adoptium contributors triage and debug issues in the GitHub repository. Thanks to my team's incredible contribution and dedication, we accomplished this goal and went further to develop a Slack Chatbot, integrating it with the latest large language models Llama3, Gemini, and ChatGPT-3.5 to improve the developer experience at Eclipse Adoptium. We also tried fine-tuning the Llama3 model with 8 billion parameters for the classification of GitHub issues in the OpenJ9 repository, which was fun and rewarding.

I want to extend special thanks to our IBM and RedHat mentors: Shelley Lambert, Lan Xia, and Longyu Zhang. They guided my team and me from the beginning of the program to its very end, keeping track of our progress and providing necessary support and guidance. Through weekly Zoom meetings and ongoing communication in Slack, we successfully completed the project deliverables and merged them with the main OpenJ9 repository.

Reflecting on this experience, I am honored to have worked alongside my incredible team members and received immeasurable support from the course professors and industry mentors. Building upon the knowledge and skills gained in this program, I look forward to continuing to contribute to open source projects, which I believe are the future of the software industry.

P.S. Check out Bel Ami's reflection on this experience too!