OpenMined Featured Contributor: December 2022

Where are you based?

I’m currently based in Gujarat, India.

What do you do (i.e. studying, working, etc.)?

I’m currently a Final Year student pursuing Bachelors of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering with Specialization in Information Security from Vellore Institute of Technology.

What   are   your   specialties   (i.e.   Python   development,   Javascript development, community organization, etc.)?

I like to explore new domains every now and then and understand the problem they’re solving. I started with Cyber Security, then came Blockchain, Backend Development, Databases, Networking, and finally here I am learning something new everyday about Federated Learning.

How and when did you originally come across OpenMined?

I was going through the Google Season of Docs 2022 accepted organizations and that's where I heard about OpenMined for the first time. The moment I went through the mission and the goal of the organization, my exploration for organizations ended there as I wanted to be a part of this movement and give back to the community in the most exciting way possible.

What was the first thing you started working on within OpenMined?

I remember trying to explore Syft and then was trying to understand a method, for which I looked up the documentation but could not find it. After a while, I saw that said method was well documented in the codebase but wasn’t on the doc webpage. I produced this locally and after a few hours of debugging with Irina, I finally was able to get the existing documentation up on our website leading me to my first major PR here at OpenMined.

And what are you working on now?

Currently, I’m incorporating feedback on the Data Owner tutorials for Syft and simultaneously working on the Data Scientist tutorials with Mrinal and Irina. These tutorials should make accessing the powers of Syft much easier for the community.

What would you say to someone who wants to start contributing?

Start exploring and keep trying out stuff! The steepest learning curve is the one where you get through bugs and errors. You will understand things with so much clarity, and if stuck, ask around in the community. Just don’t stop the hustle!

Please recommend one interesting book, podcast or resource to the OpenMined community.

I would personally recommend Computer Networking: A Top-down Approach, a book by Jim Kurose which helped me build my networking concepts in the most amazing way possible. Would 10/10 recommend it to anybody interested to dive into the world of networking to try this out! Absolute mad stuff.

Twitter:  @ShubhamInTech