Fall 2025
This semester I took four classes: Robot Operating Systems, Reinforcement Learning, AI Compilers, and Technical Communications. It was an extremely intense semester with three project-based classes and one focused on communication skills. GPU Programming from Fall 2024 gave me a foundation for thinking about how code runs on hardware, which came back in AI Compilers when we looked at how ML frameworks map down to actual execution.
Robot Operating Systems was the class where we lived in ROS. We built systems that had to run in real time — multiple nodes, topics, services — and debug when things did not line up. Reinforcement Learning was the other heavy one. I had already played with RL on the Wordle solver project, but the class went much deeper on theory and we had a larger final project. I will add more about the RL and AI Compilers final projects when I get a chance to write them up properly.
Technical Communications was the odd one out: no coding, just writing and presenting. We had to explain technical work to different audiences. It was useful but very different from the other three. By the end of the semester I was pretty drained; having ROS, RL, and compilers in the same term was a lot.