Bangla Tech Talk

Jessica Sharmin Rahman is one of those rare human beings we always hear about who can do it all. She has been taking dance lessons from the age of six and taught classical dance at Chhayanaut Cultural Centre (one most prestigious dance institution of Bangladesh) for almost eight years. But that is not her primary career. She is a young computer science researcher whose work primarily involves looking at the effects of auditory and visual stimuli on human physiological signals to analyze how sensory input influences Human affective (emotional) reasoning.

She is now a PhD Student in the Human-Centred Computing (HCC) group of the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University (ANU). Before that, she received her B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Dhaka. Recently she became the people's choice winner of The Three Minute Thesis competition (3MT) hosted by ANU for her presentation titled "Do you know how music makes you feel?".

In this episode of Bangla Tech Talk, we talked about the 3MT competition, her doctoral research, the importance of ethical thinking in computer science research, and the social dilemma both the documentary and issues we face as a society. Later in the episode, Jessica shared why both her dance and research works are equally important to her and how they help each other to be more productive. We also learned about her journey from Bharatanatyam to street dance and a brief history of both dance forms.

An outline of this episode this provided below to help navigate the conversation.

OUTLINE

00:00 - Intro

8:57 -  Three Minute Thesis

15:42 -  How do you summarize a PhD research in three minutes

21:04 - Effects of music on human physiological signals

33:29 - Ethical thinking in research

40:51 - Spotify Music Recommendation

45:35 - The social dilemma

01:07:42 - Start of nontechnical part

01:09:05 - Bharatanatyam To Street Dance

01:55:50 -  Bangladesh (The country and The people)

Zobayer Hasan was one of the top competitive programmers from the University of Dhaka. He is still a very active member of the programming contest community in Bangladesh. From his undergrad days, he is actively working with the community to spread competitive problem solving and programming education in Bangladesh. He is currently working as a Solutions Architect at TigerIT Bangladesh Ltd, where a big part of his responsibilities includes leading projects heavily dependent on machine learning and data science.

In this episode, we talked about machine learning practices and career opportunities in the software industry of Bangladesh. We also briefly discussed his programming contest days, recruiting experiences, and life beyond the tech.

An outline of this episode this provided below to help navigate the conversation.

OUTLINE

00:00 - Intro

03:30 - Beginning of Programming

09:24 - Expansion of Programming in Bangladesh

15:19 -  The days of programming contests (A beautiful problem)

19:51 - Traditional Programming to Machine Learning

24:12 - Career in Machine Learning after Undergrad

27:27 - Importance of academic knowledge for ML engineers

34:46 - Debugging a Machine Learning Model

43:04 - Machine learning in NID project

46:08 - Homegrown Machine Learning of Tiger IT

54:30 - Career opportunity as an ML engineer in Bangladesh

55:36 - How the recruiter judges a candidate

01:17:12 - Life beyond technology

01:24:13 - Future of machine learning in Software Development

While doing his final academic project at BUET, Rakib Amin fallen in love with finding bugs and security loopholes in software. He joined Therap Services as a Quality Assurance Engineer in 2015 right after his graduation. After three years in therap, Rakib joined Shopee as an automation engineer in October 2018. Currently, he is a senior engineer at Shopee and leads the android automation team.

In this episode of Bangla Tech Talk, we talked about the interview process for an automation engineer, software development cycle of shopee, test case design approach, limitations of automation, and many more. Rakib also shared his opinion on how to develop a career in software testing. And as for all the guests who are living abroad, we talked about life, people and the country.

An outline of this episode this provided below to help navigate this two hour plus conversation.

OUTLINE

01:12 - Meme Review

03:09 - How it all started

10:01 - Academic Studies for Software Testing

15:14 - Interview process for Automation Engineering

21:54 - First time outside the country

28:32 - Team structure and SDLC of Shopee

39:44 - Test case design approach

01:08:46 - Visual Bugs and Limitations of Automation

01:22:28 - Manual vs Automation Testing in Shopee

01:25:16 - Dynamic Content Testing

01:35:23 - Career Development Strategy

01:55:38 - Life, People, and Country

GUEST PROFILE

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rakibamin/

Anindya Sundar Paul is currently pursuing MSc in Informatics at the Technical University of Munich. His research interests include, but are not limited to Deep Learning, Computer Vision, and Artificial Intelligence. Before this, he completed his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Dhaka and joined digital payment platform iPay Systems Ltd as a software engineer. Andindya is also a passionate problem solver and a casual blogger. He gave up competitive programming in his second year of college due to his indomitable interest in various subjects of computer science but did not give up the practice of regular problem-solving. He sometimes writes about his education and experience in his blog.

In this episode, we talked about his competitive programming and problem-solving career, the difference between competitive programming and problem solving, the importance of regular problem solving for computer science students, his blogging, higher education in Germany, and life in Germany in general. We also talked about the differences and similarities between computer science studies in Bangladesh and Germany and the necessity (or uselessness) to learn German to pursue higher education in Germany. An outline with time is given below to help navigate this two-hour conversation.

OUTLINE

04:42 - Why study CSE

08:10 - Competitive programming

14:56 - The Difference Between Competitive Programming and Problem Solving

18:02 - The importance of regular problem solving for computer science students

25:26 - How the habit of tidying up everything started

30:59 - How does Anindya decide what to write

45:18 - How the practice of problem-solving came in handy in professional life

47:33 - How university life education came in handy in professional life

53:30 - Design pattern

59:40 - How to learn something without understanding the use case (Being comfortable with uncomfortable)

01:01:09 - Why internships are important

01:04:55 - Why Germany for higher education

01:10:14 - Application process for TUM

01:13:55 - First impressions of Germany (German language and culture)

01:21:46 - Experience taking classes at TUM

01:27:09 - Differences and similarities in the study of computer science in Bangladesh and Germany

01:32:37 - Things that can be done differently in computer science education in Bangladesh

01:42:03 - Life Germany

GUEST PROFILE

Website:https://anindyaspaul.com/

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/anindyaspaul/

After graduating from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Dhaka, Safat joins Therap Services as a freshman software engineer. After four years in Therap, he joins Grab in April 2018 and then PayPal in January 2019. He is currently working as a Java backend engineer at PayPal's Singapore office.

In this episode, we talked about Safat's journey as a software engineer. His university life. His life and academic and non-academic interests as a CSE student. Based on his current understanding of the software engineering field, what he thinks a CS student should focus on in early college days. We talked about his experience and observations as a software engineer both in Bangladesh and in the Singapore tech industry. We also talked about work from home and how big tech in Singapore is handling this global pandemic and many more.

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Profile of Today's Guest: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mshakhawat/