GSoC 2018: interested in project 2

[mdldml]

Hello, my name is Dmitrii, I am software engineer and data scientist. I'm currently studying at NRU HSE, Moscow, 2nd year of master degree (Master's programme: data science). Before that, I got a bachelor degree at ITMO University (Bachelor's programme: applied math and informatics) in 2014, and worked full-time in industry as a software engineer for about 2 years.

I've been writing code since 12 (I'm 24 now) and have been writing some code in Java since 2011. Unfortunately I didn't have much industry experience in Java (most of my work have been done in Python and C++), but I still had some projects in Java.

You can see some of my old Java code here (yes, I know that it is awful in some places, unfortunately no newer projects to show my progress):

https://bitbucket.org/mdldml/term8-networks/src
https://bitbucket.org/mdldml/term4-java-hometasks/src/

You can also find a bit of my newer code (mostly in Python) here: https://github.com/mdldml

Sometimes I participate in competitive programming contests (Google Code Jam, Codeforces, etc.), and Java is my primary language for solving problems in such contests.

I like Java precisely for the reasons other people hate Java =) It has automatic memory management, but, when compared to C++17 or Python, it has less syntax sugar. That means it is more difficult to write code that will be hard to read and maintain. Also, less abstract code encourages thinking about details of abstractions which otherwise may remain hidden.

During the project, I would like to start from unimplemented algorithms from chapters 10-13, then move to more general ones from chapter 19, and afterwards, if enough time is left, finish the rest.

I participated in AI class, one of the first MOOC courses, in 2011. To be honest, I finished the class and got the statement of accomplishment, but didn't spend enough time on the materials and wanted to return to the AIMA book later for more thorough study of the concepts. Working on this project would be a nice chance to do that.

I always wanted to try working on some open source projects. I first heard about GSoC in 2012, but didn't have time to participate or even make a proposal every time when it was held. Fortunately, this year I have a bit more time, hope I'll be able to spend it on GSoC!