About me

Hey there! Welcome to my corner of the internet. I’m Mukul, I’m a Software Engineer at Meta, having graduated with a Master’s degree at the University of Cambridge.

My goal with my blog and YouTube channel is to provide free educational resources to share what I’ve learnt through my degree, side-projects and industry experience. Please don’t hesitate to reach out on Twitter!

Interests

I’m particularly interested in product-focused software engineering roles, which let me tap into my side interest in HCI and design.

During my Master’s degree, I was particularly interested in trustworthy machine learning - tackling issues like privacy, fairness, explainability and security of machine learning models. I first learnt about the intersection of machine learning and privacy through a contribution to OpenMined, and I made videos on research in this area on my YouTube channel.

Previously I designed my own programming language Bolt: a Java-style concurrent object-oriented language, whose type system prevents data races (a class of concurrency bug also prevented by Rust’s type system). Links to the repository and the accompanying dissertation.

Some highlights:

• I was awarded the G-Research prize for the best dissertation in my year at Cambridge.
• I was invited to give a talk about Bolt to the programming language group at Facebook during my internship.
• Bolt made it on the front page of Hacker News. There’s a more technical discussion on r/ProgrammingLanguages
• I wrote a series of tutorial posts explaining each stage of the Bolt compiler, and the LLVM tutorial was received particular warmly, ranking #2 on Hacker News, and receiving ~590 upvotes on r/programming and ~140 upvotes on r/ProgrammingLanguages.

Hackathons

I’ve enjoyed participating in hackathons during my time at university. Highlights include:

• BlackRock Prize for best eco-friendly hack at HackCambridge 2020. Our project EcoScan let you scan food items to calculate your carbon footprint. My hackathon teammate Michael wrote a blog post.
• Finalist HackCambridge 2019 (top 6 of 68) - our project Out of the Vox generated mind-maps directly from speech.
• Participating in an internal Facebook hackathon on the 3rd day of my first internship with 3 other interns. This was memorable because we were able to prototype a News Feed feature (details under NDA) despite a steep ramp-up (learning the language Hack and acquainting ourselves with the gigantic codebase!).

One of my first hackathons was a Cambridge GameGig hackathon (making a retro game) back in 2017. I enjoyed it so much I started organising hackathons too!

At university, I organised a few 12-hour hackathons run at the end of term - typically attended by ~50-80 students.

• For GreenHack I was head of publicity, assisted participants with the Azure IoT kits provided and was part of the judging panel on the day.

• I then became the lead organiser for subsequent hackathons: GameGig 2018 (One-button theme), and GameGig 2019 (Countdown theme). This involved liasing with the sponsors, booking the venue and sorting out food/drink, and actually running and judging the events on the day.