Hello Outreachy!

date

Dec 8, 2025

slug

outreachy-intro

author

status

Public

category

💬 Portfolio

updatedAt

Jan 11, 2026 10:49 AM

Growing up, I did not have consistent access to a computer. My early curiosity about the world instead found an outlet through books, especially physics. Reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking sparked a deep fascination with fundamental questions about the universe and motivated me to pursue a master’s degree in physics.

During college, my interests began to shift in an unexpected direction. After watching the movie Her, I found myself thinking deeply about the nature of intelligence—what it means to understand, reason, and communicate. At the time, I believed intelligence was primarily about pattern recognition. This curiosity led me to discover machine learning, a field where intelligence could be expressed through algorithms.

I took my first formal course in machine learning and soon after discovered Stanford’s Natural Language Processing lectures online. Learning about sequence models like LSTMs was especially exciting, as they attempted to model context and memory in language. Wanting hands-on experience, I pursued an internship in NLP, where I worked on named entity recognition for noisy social media data and implemented attention mechanisms to improve model performance. This experience taught me how theoretical ideas translate into real-world systems.

After completing my master’s degree, I worked in industry at KYC Hub and Enlyft, applying NLP and data science techniques to due diligence and targeted marketing problems. While these roles helped me grow as an engineer, I began to notice something important: most advances in machine learning and generative AI depend heavily on reliable, high-performance infrastructure—libraries and systems that many developers rely on but few get the opportunity to build.

This realization motivated a major shift in my path. I decided to step away from my job to focus on systems programming and open source. I learned Rust, studied distributed systems, and began contributing to Apache DataFusion. Working on an open source project helped me understand the value of collaboration, code review, and building software that benefits a global community.

I learned about Outreachy through Kunal Kushwaha’s YouTube channel, and the program immediately resonated with me. Outreachy’s emphasis on mentorship, learning, and inclusion aligned strongly with what I was seeking at this stage of my journey. Among the listed projects, building the OxCaml backend for the Raven project stood out as an exciting opportunity to work at the intersection of compilers, systems, and performance-critical infrastructure.

I began contributing to the project, learning the codebase and engaging with the community. I am deeply grateful to have been selected for this project by my mentor, Thibaut. I am excited for the challenges ahead and for the opportunity to learn from experienced open source contributors while making meaningful contributions of my own.

Outreachy represents more than an internship to me—it is a chance to grow as an engineer, deepen my understanding of open source development, and contribute to software that empowers others. I look forward to the journey ahead and to learning as part of the Outreachy community.