here's a list of things i've worked on (and the places where i did it).
julep: https://github.com/julep-ai/julep
worked on the repo. i once screwed up the git history while cleaning it lol. actually contributing to a work-in-progress but well-designed architecture was eye-opening. i now realize how much i like reading larger codebases.
ran evals on fine-tuned models, made a dataset, and helped clean some other datasets. got much better at importing pandas as pd than i ever was before. first time getting my hands dirty with local llms, fine-tuning, inference, quantization, etc.
got much better at talking to ppl/customers and understanding what to build. social battery +10%!
nous: https://github.com/noushq/
built a bookmark search engine in 6 weeks. ~300 ppl in a waitlist, 100 installs, 2 ppl paid for it too! saw this as an absolute win.
tried (& failed) to hit ramen profitability. i've written more about this on a substack
got 0-1 in javascript, indie-hacking, product engg and so much more! long ways to go still :)
imdea research institute
worked on a research hypothesis trying to test the security of third party domains and the public suffix list which describes the effective top-level domains. went down the rabbit hole of so many papers, blogs and even old mozilla bug threads!
made an actual, usable ml pipeline for the first time! did everything from scraping arbitrary domains from the internet concurrently, establishing the ground-truth, and then classifying it. it (kinda) worked!
cloudsek
really fun security engg internship where i ran phishing campaigns by chaining two vulnerabilities and gave an internal talk about it.
made a service that used heuristics to identify the services used by websites. made another service to scan for vulnerable log4j servers. first time where i was thrown in front of a client and demoed a product (they converted too!)
learnt so much about working in a cohesive team. could just walk over to ppl and pick up projects for them. discovered how to be high agency in a startup.
miscellaneous stuff
replicated a microsoft vulnerability with a cvss of 10. write up
made an imsi sniffer and saw all the repeating tmsi numbers around me. another write up
gave my first talk in front of people about software defined radio and hacking radio devices. video
gave a talk about container runtimes and their internals at a systems and security meetup. video