Wrapped up Winter Quarter at UCSC!

Just wrapped up my Winter Quarter at UCSC. From machine translation systems to full-stack apps, and a lot of life stuff in between!

Academic

This quarter, I took a class on Machine Learning for NLP (CSE244B) and a class on Full Stack Web Development (CSE186), along with a Gen Ed on cultures and astronomy (ASTR49).

CSE244B — Machine Learning for NLP (focused on machine translation systems)

About the class:

The class was focused on the problem of Machine Translation, particulalry:

• Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) &
• Neural Machine Translation (NMT)

Roughly 75% of the class was on Statistical MT and only the last 25% covered Neural MT.

In teams, we implemented each component of a phrase-based machine translation system (from scratch!) and then assembled them into a full end-to-end pipeline. Our system translated between Hindi ↔ English.

The components of our phrase based MT system

Given the limited time for neural methods, we didn’t build an NMT model from scratch. Instead, we trained existing systems like Joey NMT and Marian NMT to get hands-on experience with modern approaches.

My thoughts on the class:

In the Fall, I took a Machine Learning course (CSE142) with Prof. Rudnick, who previously worked at Google on Google Translate. He used a lot of NLP-focused examples throughout the course, which really sparked my interest in the field, especially the problem of machine translation.

At the same time, with how prominent AI and LLM-based tools have become, I also wanted to better understand what’s actually going on under the hood. After that class, I knew I wanted to go deeper into NLP, so taking this course felt like a natural next step.

I’m also planning to continue this in the Spring with CSE143, again taught by Prof. Rudnick.

I learnt a lot about using ML for the problem of machine translation. I was mainly interested in the Neural stuff we did close to the end of the class.

Some of my key takeaways:

• A clearer understanding of sequence-to-sequence models
• How encoder–decoder architectures work
• High-level intuition for RNNs, LSTMs, attention mechanisms, and Transformers

Since we didn’t implement these models from scratch, my understanding is more conceptual than implementation-level—for now.

CSE186 — Full Stack Web Development I

About the class:

This class felt a lot like a fast-paced coding bootcamp. Assignments were due every week, with each one building directly on concepts from the previous weeks, so things ramped up quickly.

The final project was a 2-week mini project where we built a Facebook-like application from scratch.

Tech stack & concepts covered:

The tech stack used

My thoughts on the class:

There were things I liked and disliked about this class.

What I liked was how relevant it was to real-world full-stack development. We used a modern tech stack and followed practices that felt very close to industry. I also appreciated that we built everything from scratch, starting from basic HTML and CSS and gradually working our way up to a full application.

What I didn’t like was the grading system. We had to write our own test scripts and hope they aligned with the hidden autograder tests. I understand the intention, to simulate real-world development where you’re responsible for testing your own code, but in practice, it often felt like shooting in the dark.

I learnt:

• Test Driven Development (TDD)
• writing code in JavaScript
• writing REST API’s in ExpressJS
• Developing frontends with React
• Implementing authentication using JWTs

Life & Other

Celebrated my dad’s 50th birthday 🎉

Attended a guest lecture by Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown) on high-dimensional spheres, surreal to see someone whose videos I’ve watched for years in person.

pic I took at the talk

He also posted the recording of the talk on his YT channel. Link

Went to a climbing gym for the first time, so I’m basically Alex Honnold now…

Also, hit up the grappling club open mat the same day… right after climbing and a leg day.

In hindsight, this was a terrible idea.

Gym progress

Great consistency in the gym this quarter. Basically went 4-5 times every single week (with an exception of 2 weeks where I only went twice)

From Hevy

LeetCode progress

Started the Year off really strong, was really trying to get the january badge for daily challenge problems. But by the end of Jan I realised I am nowhere near good enough to do most of these problems, and I was ending up just looking at the solution for really hard problems. Then, as usual, I got busy with school & life, and basically completely stopped doing leetcode :(

From LeetCode

Chess progress

I had started taking chess classes last Fall, but my mum thinks chess is a complete waste of time and told me to focus on getting a job first.

Basically, no chess progress this quarter. I try to play a blitz/bullet game or two each day to keep my daily streak going (at 408 days as of writing this)