2023 Year in Review

This is a yearly ritual I like to do to get a sense of what I have accomplished throughout the year.

You can find last year’s blogpost here.

Summary

The first few months of the year I went on an exchange at the University of Manchester.

I learned to live and travel independently and developed some impactful friendships. It definitely still stands as one of my most memorable experiences to date.

You can read more about my exchange here.

During the summer, I participated in the Google Summer of Code program with CVXPY.

I ended up making some important contributions that brought major performance improvements to the canonicalization process.

I also had the chance to meet with my GSoC mentors Philipp and Steven during the SciPy 2023 conference in Austin, Texas.

You can read more details about my brief summer update here.

Finally, I came back to Concordia to complete my second to last semester of undergrad. I completed my undergraduate project along with four other classes. I also applied for graduate school and plan on detailing my journey in a future blogpost.

Learning goals for next year

If you’ve read my review from last year, you might wonder how many of my learning resolutions did I manage to tackle?

And the answer would be absolutely none.

But do not despair, as I am almost certain I will finally be able to take on two of last year’s resolutions: learning Rust and reading journal papers.

With a continued interest in working on Open Source and improving canonicalization performance, a CVXPY Rust backend is at the top of my priority list.

In addition, having made contact with a Professor from Polytechnique Montréal, I was already assigned a few preliminary papers to read on the topic of Input Convex Neural Networks. Albeit, my goal isn’t to fully understand the theory but instead being able to apply some new techniques to power system applications.

As for other learning goals, given that I am about to take a Compiler Design class, I would be excited to get a deeper practical understanding of topics in parsing and compilers.

I believe the skills and knowledge I acquire in this class could potentially translate to future improvements in CVXPY and elsewhere.

Finally, I would like to set a harder goal of contributing in a published journal paper. I think with enough preparation and luck, some opportunities could turn out to be fruitful.