Joined Polywork via referral + linked it to my website! 

After two years at UCD Netsoc, I handed the position to an incoming second-year student. That said, I'll be perpetually around to deal with any unexpected shenanigans and as a boomer alumni. 

While there, I managed over 12k in assets, applied for grants from UCD, and liaised between our sponsors and bank for problems that came with the pandemic. Other than financials, I also helped organized two well-received CV/Interview workshops with external companies, an Introduction to React workshop with fellow classmates, and generally helped the committee wherever I could. 

I'm glad I took Oisín's (auditor at the time) advice and applied to be treasurer back in 2019. University life wouldn't be the same without the banter. I attribute my fourth-year sanity to Netsoc's ever-growing Discord server. 😌

Submitted my bachelor thesis titled "Biasing a News Recommender System by Learning an Optimal Attack Strategy". It was supervised by Dr. Aonghus Lawlor and marks the end of my journey at UCD. 

GitHub, Thesis 

It involved experiments on PoisonRec, a Python-based reinforcement learning framework, that learns how to attack recommender systems. GRU4Rec, the underlying recommender system, learnt the user activity on the Microsoft News Dataset (MIND) to recommend news articles. PoisonRec would make up fake users and fake views in an attempt to manipulate the recommendations made. These manipulations, i.e. bias introduced into the recommender system, is then quantified.

The experiments showed that PoisonRec:

• has varying levels of success between different news categories
• is more successful when pushing new articles compared to existing articles
• is more successful among sparse user activity than dense user activity

Other than the experiments, I learned that I'm a fairly quick learner. I jumped into this project and PoisonRec's codebase without experience with Python or managing its libraries. I came out of the other side having worked with pickle files, troubleshooting my data, figuring out the codebase (to some extent), an appreciation of Python list comprehension, and more questions about the experiment results I got. I hope this means I can pick up other languages quickly while only having the most experience with Java. 💭

Built an app called Gallery in a team of three. It is a social gallery and image annotation app that allows users to upload images, annotate existing images, and upvote or downvote existing annotations.

We were learning about distributed systems and was going to implement technologies we've never used before, which was quite exciting. We wanted to make yet another messaging app until I thought aloud about annotating lyrics on Genius.com and how people share memes/art - the project suddenly came to life. 

We scoped out the "structure" of the system: Spring boot as the backend, MongoDB as the database, React as the frontend, Keycloack for user authentication, Elasticsearch to search, Eureka for service discovery, and Zuul for the API gateway. My main responsibilities involved implementing the users service, the client, and testing the application.

One of these days, I'll figure out how to host it on AWS and preventing pictures that aren't wholesome memes 👁👄👁

Ended my journey as QA Intern at Ding.com!

There, I reviewed feature stories, verified new features and bug fixes, found and reported bugs, performed smoke tests and regression, and kept test cases updated for their mobile apps team.

I was part of delivering these features:

• Gift cards – Allow users to buy gift cards like Paysafecard, Spotify, Google Play, etc.
• Export user history – Allow users to export a pdf of all successful transactions in a period for tax purposes, thus clearing up customer care’s queue.
• Opt-in to marketing communications on registration & order success - To encourage users to opt into marketing emails for promotions.
• Floating CTAs on order summary & receipt 
• UX Improvements
• Emarsys integration – For in-app notifications & marketing communications.
• Auto top-up – Allow users to send a top-up every set amount of days automatically.

Outside of that, I shadowed the QA Automation Engineers on the mobile apps and web teams to learn about automated testing. I also learned that I like working from home 😅

Re-elected as treasurer at UCD Netsoc 🤯

(Picture on the left: Incoming committee 2020/21)
(Picture on the right: Outgoing committee 2019/20)

All committee members, past and present