Saransh's (not so) short intro
ARC Collaborations Hour - 1/10/2024
How back should I go?
Grandparents migrated from current day Pakistan to current day India
You might notice both cultures in me
Grew up in New Delhi
Physics and Math kid
Took C++ in high school, hated CS
Discovered Manim through 3B1B
Using Python to do Math (and build animations) caught my interest
Started university online (CS and Math)
Combination of societal pressure to be an engineer/doctor and love for math (had to leave physics)
Got into the CS culture
Built a ton of apps (for fun, as a startup, for work) with backend and database integrations
no logo for others, but I promise, a lot more...
Big break - won a hackathon organised by Elasticsearch
Something was missing, I wasn't interested in plain SE anymore
Found NumFOCUS
Got hooked onto open-source scientific software
Google Summer of Code under PyBaMM, NumFOCUS
- Built a user-facing application with PyBaMM
- Infrastructure and build upgrades
- Plotting functionalities and bug fixes
- Started maintaining parts of the library
- Steering committee member now
Technical Writer for Julia's FluxML ecosystem
- Wrote a lot of content in every possible form
- Developed FluxML's new website
- Some developments in Julia's website
- Documented Julia's documentation tools
- Minor bug fixes here and there
Co-authored vector under IRIS-HEP and Princeton
- So much work on vector, took lead on releases, now the primary maintainer
- Some work on the other libraries in the Scikit-HEP ecosystem
- Some work on developer tools and guide (now under Scientific Python)
Did a lot of stuff here and there...
Found an interest in Data Science for Social Good
worked under professors
another shot at building a startup
continued maintaining open-source software and started contributing to a lot more scientific software + developer tools
Spent a summer at McMasterU
Worked on Agda's standard library
- The better Haskell, no documentation
- Wrote proofs and algorithms for mathematical data containers
- Refactored a lot of API
- A ton of random theoretical CS and Maths stuff
Canada was amazing!
Did more stuff here and there...
More Data Science for Social Good
unofficially teaching juniors at DU
More involvement with open-source software - mentoring students, admin roles, got invited for pyhep.dev but visa issues
Led a tech fest and a hackathon at DU
CERN!
Spent the last 8 months of my degree at CERN under PICSciE
Worked on the Pythonic-HEP ecosystem
- Making Awkward Array, Vector, and Coffea auto-differentiable
- Non-uniform rebinnning in boost::histogram’s Python bindings
- Swapping Coffea’s vector manipulation backend
- Dask, JAX, and SymPy support for Vector
- A new Python library for filling histograms on GPUs
Roamed around Schengen and others
Lived in Switzerland (Geneva), France (Saint Genis), and Switzerland (Geneva-Geneva)
🇫🇮🇨🇭🇫🇷🇪🇸🇮🇹🇳🇱🇩🇪...🇵🇱🇪🇬
🎞️ and polaroid pictures >>
Finished university online
Last day at DU - December 2023
Joined ARC as an Assistant RSE
One common thing in most of my experiences was building software for research and I loved it
At ARC
- Making GLASS GPU and autodiff compatible with Paddy
- Developing contents, infrastructure, and TAing for COMP0233 with David, Will, and Krishna
- Possibly in a mentorship role to make RadioJAX GPU and autodiff compatible with Tuomos
- PyHEP.dev and RSECon
Strengths
- Python!
- Agda!
- Open-science and open-source!
- More practical/experimental background
- Trained to be a software engineer
Weaknesses
- Too much Python :(
- No one really uses Agda :(
- Never worked on a closed-source project (avoids)
- Less pure sciences background
- Trained to be a software engineer
Interests
- Scientific computing (and some HPC) with Python
- Mathematical theorem provers, type theory, and some functional programming
- DevOps and build infrastructures (mostly for Python and C++ projects)
- Data Science for Social Good (also Julia’s ML ecosystem, kind of left behind now)
- Big open-source + open-science + developer tools person
- Was into cross-platform android development and backend development once
Other interests/fun facts
- Traveling (both solo and with friends)
- Cooking (to save money for traveling)
-
Haven’t done any of these since I moved here, but I plan to restart them soon
- hiking (Canada and Swiss effect)
- bouldering and calisthenics (Swiss effect)
- bicycling
- staring at the night sky and photographing eclipses (telescopes in India😞)
- capturing moments on 🎞️
- can speak English, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu
- could speak German at one point, learning Burmese right now
- was a taekwondo 🟢 belt, could play 🎹, tried my hand at 🎻, 🎾, 🕺🏻, ...