Headstarter

Quick way to vet CS STUDENT: Ask “what are you building?” If you see their eyes light up and they talk about code, idea and why its important to them. Good signal. If they talk about idea, no implementation ie didn’t get off local host with excuses like school, job hunt etc Weak signal. You cant control how someone interprets your work. But you can self-advocate what you build from passion. You actually dont have to sell yourself. Your work, body language, tone will come out. It will dial a chord with the listener. Agree?

"Headstarters really been a game changer for me, it's actually the reason my current employers are impressed with me." I woke with some great news yesterday morning from many of our residents. Exciting to hear!

Hey everyone! As many of you know, I’ve spent the past five months participating in Headstarter's Accelerator program. It’s incredible just how quickly the time's flown by, and now, my journey through the program has come to a close. Yesterday marked my final day as a Headstarter Software Engineering Resident. Throughout my residency: • I developed and deployed 14 AI applications • I experimented with creating my own recommendation algorithm, built an AI-powered code editor, and trained a model to predict financial market instability • I was introduced to exciting technologies, like Modal's serverless cloud infrastructure and open-source projects Judge0 and Puter • I honed my problem-solving skills by working through LeetCode-style DSA problems in AI-led mock interviews • On top of that, I had the opportunity to meet regularly with my mentor for code reviews and updates on my internship search Now that I've completed my residency, I'm excited to chart my own course and put these AI skills and the experience I've gained to great use. I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who made this program such a valuable experience: To Yasin Ehsan and Faizan Ahmed of Headstarter, to Hassan Syed, Nabeel Farooqui, Angelica Iacovelli, and Abdullah Nauman, and to all the founders we had the chance to speak with—including Nariman Jelveh, who we met just this week. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to mentor and guide us. It was inspiring to hear about your journeys and learn from some of the best. For anyone looking to gain hands-on experience in iterative development, open-source contributions, data structures and algorithms, or building solutions to real problems that startups are trying to solve right now, I highly recommend giving Headstarter's Accelerator a shot. Especially if you struggle with accountability or staying motivated—Yasin does a fantastic job of making sure you stay on track. Excited for what this next chapter holds! 🚀 #HeadstarterAccelerator #AI #TechCommunity #SoftwareEngineering #CSstudent

You just never know. Which project takes off. Which team brings the best out of you. Which user or customer opens light blub. Which code segment creates value. Which prompt engineering leads to retention. Which landing page yeilds eyeballs for virality. Which launch post, tweet or linkedin gives feedback. Which git commit, pr or merge sticks together. Which little atomic action makes your project take off. What you do know: did you GOL- “Get off Local Host.” Yes or No. agree?

In case you needed motivation to work on projects and publish on GitHub... "Everyone we've hired came from GitHub" - Nariman Jelveh Founder & CEO of Puter For these next two weeks, Headstarter Software Engineering Residents will be working on making an open source contribution to the Puter repo, which has 29k+ stars and over 100,000 monthly active users Puter has become one of the fastest growing commercial open source projects in the past several years Any contribution to the Puter repo is extremely high signal for any hiring manager. This is how you can stand out in todays market, super excited to see what our Residents are able to do 🚀

Tips on SMALL TALK for CS STUDENTS

3 tips to convert your LinkedIn DM for CS Students: - keep short - instant rapport - end in question What are your best 2 tips that worked?

This weekend I met Vanohra. She will be interning at Duolingo this summer. Did Headstarter last summer. Vanohra shared how the 5 projects in Headstarter last summer pushed her. Giving her the edge to land a paid research position and Duolingo SWE internship. Congratulations Vanohra Gaspard!!! These are some amazing stories from people who tool the fellow seriously and turned a W. A month ago someone shared who he landed a 200k role at a startup new grad. Love to hear more stories so love if you could DM me them!!! So proud of everyone. Congrats!!!

“Conquering the AI Narrative” My speech to 1,100 cs students at GT Hack Kickoff. Will AI and ASI become omnipotent? Know the physical space: what we see, what we think, what we feel, what we believe etc Know the latent space: think 3 dimensional plane. Vectors from linear algebra. Grok 3 by Elon was trained on 2.7 Trillion Dimensions or parameters. The latent space is essentially a reduction of the physical space. Think “dot product” in linear algebra. Any new creation in latent space is still within our imagination or our lens of distillation and how we experience the physical. Noam Chomsky, world famous linguist coins gen ai as a “parrot.” 1 billion knowledge worker jobs will be effected by ai and asi. How do you win? Build. Build. Build. Tinker. Dabble. GOL. (Get off local host) And put your self in environments that are the most conducive to build… Move to San Francisco!!! This is the largest data science hackathon in the US. 4 auditoriums were entirely full. Huge shoutout to organizers Shreiyas Saraf @emma @archie. Ty for inviting me again. Lastly an incredible experience to all the amazing hacker. I am now back in sf but… Headstarter mentor Sai Surisetti is there (founding eng at yc startup). You guys rock. Everyone I spoke to has great potential. If you need any help / feedback, my dms are always open. GOL!!!! (Get off local host!!!)

Fun GOL (get off localhost) meetup at Georgia Tech! Exciting minds, fun ships and and bold visions. Vibes here were immaculate. 2 folks I will send them for interviews right away. If you are still around, come to @hackalytics kick off at 5:30 today. I will be giving a speech called “Conquering the AI Narrative.” Where should we do a meetup next?