that's not great um is my audio working at least yeah your audio is really good right check here hold on let me try the camera one more time H guys it' be cool if you guys can oh that's you I see you there you go that's me awesome awesome all right so quick format of today's call is we're gonna just discuss a quick fireside chat with M he's going to introduce himself and share like how long he's known about the head Journey Mofi has been an integral part about creating this uh uh curriculum uh he's one of our advisers um and uh quick introduction to Mofi uh so we we'll cover Mofi and after Mofi segment is done for the next 20 minutes or so uh we will uh do some general Q&A people may have about the application so quick introduction to Mofi Mofi graduated from City College of New York in 2019 he worked at IBM for a couple of years Mofi has been to over 40 hackathons or he has judged in over 40 hackathons including my second and my 11th hackathon my 11th hackathon I won first place at hack Cornell and Mofi was one of the judges there today Mofi works at Google on the kubernetes team and Google Gemini uh engineering team so mie if you want to just quickly take on and just give us a few words of wisdom H quick maybe five 10 minutes when I can ask you some questions or ask the users ask you questions sure yeah uh uh quick correction I graduated in 2017 but right but in the middle there are a couple of years that that probably don't count for most people so we're going to kind of like ignore uh what whatever happened between 2020 and 2022 um I kind of erased that from memory so it's okay if we kind of cut off two years from Life um yeah I I was at IBM I was initially at uh the IBM Watson team initially working on whatson health from there moved on to IBM Cloud focusing a lot on the container side of things uh IBM Cloud launched our kubernetes service around the same time redhead acquisition went through so we're doing a lot of work on the open sh sh uh platform that IBM has um and since then I actually made a short stint over to Vonage Vonage is a telecom uh API provider company where I worked on their uh video API platform where it could build kind of like your own video chat just like the one we were on right now um and while I was at vage pretty shortly after uh recruiters from Google reached out so it was kind of like a you could not an offer you could not refuse so you kind of uh made that switch I'm in the Google kubernetes engine gke team um right now focusing mostly on running a AML workload um but other partial team I work on is called Gemma so Gemma is a open model uh in the same vein of Gemini models that you would probably be able to see if you go to J.G google.com so ji is open model that you can run yourself locally if you have a GP available or on the cloud um yeah so I think like uh my first for with the head starter has been I mean as Yasiin mentioned I ran into him quite a lot through his journey through college and kind of going through that hackathon scene in while I was a student I probably participated roughly about 20 to 30 hackathons and in professional setting as a judge about 30 to 40 more hackathons um so kind of like that space of students finding their footing finding the things they like and finding their space and place in this industry which is pretty big I think Yasin at some point would be able to share that image out of like the map of computer science like how many different things that are possible Cass and I had had like I think a lot of good conversation about that image alone right like we have we talked a lot about like what it means to be um like in the industry of a software engineering because it is very big it is very wide and it covers pretty much all aspect of life in the next 10 15 years even before AI was kind of overtaking pretty much every as of our life U General computer knowledge and general programming knowledge was going to become probably pretty essential in all aspects of life like I speak to my mechanical engineer friends and for the most part like they're learning python because dealing with things like AutoCAD software or this like Machining softwares require you to have programming skills to do those scripting work to do your work better uh even my doctor friends actually need to understand some software tools because they're always using computer they're using this tools having understanding of how these softwares work what makes a good UI in every domain is going to become so in some ways skills of software engineering is not something that is isolated to software Engineers only this is a problem solving skill that kind of touches every aspect of your life like um in in shopping in retail in in banking every aspect every type of companies need software solution right so um one of the challenges there as well is I think with AI and that barrier to entry somewhat actually increased in some ways mainly because um that path from not knowing anything to becoming Junior to mid-level to senior in some ways a lot of companies are thinking if they can give their senior Engineers these AI tools and kind of bypass that whole process of upskilling people from scratch which is a very expensive Endeavor for companies right generally speaking so um the whole concept of again not not someone who believes very strongly in the idea of 10x engineer per se but you can force multiply right if you're good at something using these tools you can definitely increase productivity in certain ways but at the same time when you have no context of kind of like the what does not work these AI tools can sometimes become can even make you slower because debugging an AI provided solution at sometimes can become very challenging right so um the whole point on saying this is getting breaking into the job market has probably been the hardest it has ever been mainly because um companies a lot of companies with the layoff with the interest rate going higher not having the infinite VC money that was flowing through does not have the either the resources or the interest to build out that great pipeline of new Engineers coming in um when I was getting my first job at IBM someone was saying that for your salary like whatever salary you make for every $100 of your salary to hire you for one year it cost IBM three times that mainly because it's lost productivity if you are someone new someone senior Engineers has to spend their time in up upskilling you and then you are not going to produce as much things but also you're gonna like hold on to a lot of tickets because they're gonna give you stuff you're gonna take longer to finish them so the companies were willing to make that investment right like companies are willing to make their investment in new folks because that was the pipeline they're building out that was the like that was going to be their next Generation like the people today they're investing in tomorrow they're going to become senior engineers and train the Next Generation as well as produce great product um that is something right now at least in this point in time companies are trying to reevaluate can they kind of bypass that way and just hire senior Engineers give them all the ey tools Under the Sun and see if they can outproduce their competition right that is the kind of the game we're in um so when I think I first heard of head starter I actually I would almost say went to the point of grilling Yasin like why why this particular way and not other way like boot camps exist like what is the particular aspect of it and I mean I I joined probably like about 30 minutes into the calls he probably already mentioned some of the philosophy behind and time and time again I think we still meet every couple of weeks to a month just to like talk ideas and um think through this is a problem that is very near and dear to my heart of how do people uh go from not knowing something to knowing something right as someone who works on Google Cloud our product I am at times tasked with like teaching our customers how do you go about using one of our product one of our features and that moment of okay I did not know something and that just click now I understand this and now I can actually like not only use this but excel in it and grow in this space and put bring my own ideas that zero to one connection is probably the hardest among all of it right upskilling like the first step is probably one of the hardest Journey because oftentimes you don't know what you don't know um so there is like this whole quadrant of things that are known known Known Unknown Unknown Known and unknown unknown and half the time we're struggling with what we don't know uh like without talking to people without having the team collaboration without building things you don't actually know you can be in an endless loop of like tutorials and uh blogs and videos and you can learn all that like top level things that you can learn but until you actually go about put your elbow greas into building something fun you don't really reach into that like like Chasm of this does not work how do I go about fixing that unless because if you're doing and Building Things everybody else is building and doing things you are not necessarily like treading New Path right you're not building out something new that people are going to be interested in as they like a product everybody doesn't matter what job role you are in you are in sales what I mean by that is if you're in Engineering in your company you are in sales to make sure other teams buy into the ideas you're selling if you're product management you are selling these ideas to Engineers selling the product to customers right if you are in sales that's in the job description you're selling that stuff right so everybody's job at some level is selling and that comes from like putting out ideas writing documentation uh putting out like recruiting people to work with your ideas so um again I I spoke a lot of bunch of different things I want to have enough time for people to have questions as well what I what I want to finish with is that something like a a program like headstar I think gives you a decent structure to kind of uh have the boundary to test yourself in sometimes like having no uh what is the word accountability without like program like this not saying you could not just like go out there find a group of people some projects like go out there and even create a startup or make your resume really good and get a job that is absolutely possible but having a structure around it like having a team structure having some accountability to present having some accountability to publish stuff get something deployed that definitely creates a lot more accountability that helps people keep on the right track often time which is missing from your average day-to-day life it is always easy to take the easy path out and not go through the hardship of having to build having to learn and grow learning and growing is hard things right this something that challenges us that mentally physically uh it is a time commitment all of these things are not easy right like a lot of people with the rise of boot camp and other things uh have an idea that I'm gonna spend like three months all of a sudden I'm gonna have like a million dollar job it is possible it has happened but it is much rarer than those flashy news articles make you would might make you think um well I don't want to sound too pessimistic definitely this is a grow even with our recent setback and everything else this is a growing industry we need software Engineers more than ever with the impending doom of AI taking everybody's job over even with that like I think until until uh The Singularity happens we'll continue to uh I think be needed and uh with that like I have again being at Google and using a lot of these tools firsthand uh my like key takeaway is these tools make people that are good better and people that are like um average competent right so it is like a force multiplier if you are bringing in like negative skills to something it would actually slow you down way more so there is a like a the need for knowing things and be competent in things does not really go with just because you have access to Gemini chat gbt uh CLA or these kind of like big models and these models are expensive on its own right so that's kind of forget the cost part but even without that um if you don't know something you're going to spend way too much time to kind of figure out what it said is right or wrong versus just like the inherent knowledge to be able to use this tools as a collaborator rather than like oracles yes see and I'm going to uh open it back up to you if you I did not I could not read the chat it's pretty small on the screen for me so if you can kind of feel some of those questions if there's any yeah yeah I so guys I recommend you guys to take a screenshot of M talking you can use this to like post on LinkedIn share with others uh M whenever I speak with m as as some of our other advisers I just love talking and all the time mie I'm like man I wish other people tun into like our discussion and today actually we're able to do that so uh one of the questions I have for you I have like two or three questions I want to ask you mie um about the importance of accountability in team based things um how important do you think is team collaboration you as an interviewer you have interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people uh you've all so I just want to ask you how important is team collaboration uh in the software engineering world yeah I think I mean it it goes both ways right like one is the part you man mentioned of interviewing people and like trying to get someone the job the first aspect of it right so I'll speak on both sides of it number one is I think school creates an unrealistic expectation of okay your individual work you're GNA kind of do those no cheating no sharing and that kind of a thing which is I understand for like an Integrity you want to make sure that every individual person knows what they're talking about but the moment you go into like a job that all kind of goes away right your goal is completely different compared to what school's goal is school's goal is to take 50 40 60 however many people in that class and make sure everybody knows like what they're talking about in that curriculum a job's goal is to make sure if there's six people in a team it is one six or like some ratio of that work being divided up and everybody who is focusing on their part knows that really well and there are some overlap so that team can have some support system kind of like flowing through but your output is not going to be 100% your output is going to be some percent of the total 100% workload right that is the when you get the job when you're working in a team when you're interviewing someone and this is kind of like we have rubrics and other things when you're interviewing folks but one of the things we look at is that is this person is going to be a good teammate we don't like when you are hiring people for jobs we are not looking for people that are going to come in and like solve all the problem and go home right that's not like if if that was possible like industry would be done we just have solved all the problem with all the smart peop and we just be home or some other planet at this point we have problems and the problems are bigger than one person can solve and they change they rapidly change the update that we have to innovate we have to continuously change how we solve things and what we actually are solving for so that we can keep doing the next best thing um so interviews like collaboration within interview not only just we're hoping to have someone that is going to collaborate with us within the interview but we're also looking for Golden signals that are going to tell us this person is going to be good collaborator going forward forward in the job if they were to H get hired in the team they're getting hired for right if this person is going to be good fit for that particular culture of that team uh in general like we have a very open culture of like communication collaboration like uh we have a very strong one-on-one culture where we meet with people that are not even in our direct PA and where meeting with them asking them questions about what they're doing what kind of interesting they have been working on so that's not always the same culture across but generally speaking I feel like interview is always a two-way straight where you are trying to figure out whether or not this person is going to be a good fit for the team and for on your end you also want to make sure the things they're saying about their teams fits what do you want to do I and I understand in this market as like a new grad as like a young engineer it's hard to have those strong boundaries oftentimes we don't want to sound difficult we don't want to sound like we are like asking for too much but at the end of the day if you think about it um if you are like just finishing college and I'm I don't I see few faces I don't see a lot of like I don't know who everybody's age are but I'm going to take a wild guess that you are all within the age range of 15 to 30 right like I think I'm in that range I'm pretty accurate so if that is true and if you're looking at the average like tenor and like uh the the the retirement age on the other end you are talking about anywhere between 30 to 30 50 years depending on how many what our retirement age ends up being in the next 10 to 15 years 30 to 50 years doing this thing unless you have like a business plan that you want to get out with rough estimation 10 years doing this thing right in that intch can you imagine yourself doing this type of job for the next 10 years because the first job that you decide to take on also kind of dictate what the next job you're going to have because the your experience in this job the how many people do you know starts off in like finance and then move on to medicine and then move on to like intch like move on to Medicine then move on to something like automaker like people's kind of once they get into the industry tech for finance they're going to be moving around those Banks over and over again because that's the uh like the kind of connections they grow that's the kind of Technology they're familiar with so the next job it's going to be much easier to stay within like Finance than compared to like move on to like move on to Automotive industry right so things like this so your first job you have to become piy so that means you have to be good enough where you are getting those interviews and H have the choice of becoming picky I know so many people out of school like get the first interview first job offer and have to take it because they don't want to be without a job it's hard right so um build doing the preloading yourself with the work to make sure that you are employable like you get your cream of the your choice of the job that you want is pretty valuable uh so team collaboration you have to not only look for the team that you want to work for and they have to find the people it has to be a good team match no matter what it's not just about like passing an interview because it's after you have pass the interview then the actual job starts so you have to make sure this is the kind of team this is the kind of job you're looking for to do for the next however many years you're going to do that for uh Mofi just on that highlight of teams right uh we're asking people people so to look at uh to to find their own teammates for the fellowship projects as you've seen there's going to be five projects that goes from the h csss to more uh rigorous uh like rag pipelines and uh AI customer service stripe pay walls uh we actually also are asking our fellows to those who are accepted and those who are still pending to in the last two weeks to create a project that's going to try to get a thousand users or $1,000 in Revenue uh and they have different tracks without going to detail about the tracks right now my main thing is what should people do when looking for a team and once the team is made how can they as students or like let's say novice Engineers create successful team camaraderie uh and structure so that there's deadlines a lot of these people this the first time that they're uh creating team so any advice on that since you have you've worked in both corporate as student and hackathon everything right so I I would say for teams to succeed the most important work are the non sexy work um for teams like teams that are really successful had really good people that are willing to do the non- cool stuff like managing a project or keeping docks or writing notes or scheduling meetings helping each other in terms of unblocking other folks which there is not a lot of Glory in like doing the management type work but most of this project uh like my first ever hackathon which we failed miserably in we had five of us all of us were pretty good at building Android apps and our project did not go anywhere because all of us were good at building Android apps right you need to have a good balance of folks that do multiple different types of things so when you're looking for a team don't look for people that has your skill set right you want to look for people that has skill set you are lacking in and it is sometimes hard as I said like an unknown what you don't know you don't know it's sometimes hard to figure out like what are you missing in a project that's where I think discussion in like whatever servers they have set up either slack or Discord talking about like what does successful project mean if at the top level if you're if you're looking to build uh mobile application you obviously need UI Engineers like that are going to design the UI you need backend folks you need database folks you need someone to just be the project manager although that is not probably something you want to do but you might want to do some sort of rotational thing like it's a team each of us are going to take one of the projects to become the project manager for um as long as you find people that are willing to adapt and are like not completely set in their ways that this is what I do and this is all I'm going to do you're going to have a pretty good time you're going to learn a lot of things you're gonna find out like your limitations as well as things you might be actually interested in but never took the time to try out uh to because you never had the opportunity to try something out like that I I definitely agree so I want actually just one question before um which is uh can you talk about AI like more specifically like let's say I am new to this field right um like maybe I heard of Lang chain or rag pipelines how do I build a strong like how would I learn AI today like I W to have you seen a picture Mofi which is like data science is here full stack is here in between is AI engineer a person who can create agents how do I get started in my like Journey today like more tactical advice of course there head starter here but just in general yeah know I think it it all this to come from a position of solving a problem like learning completely blind is difficult because again there's just so much things you can I could probably if I just said I'm gonna want to Lear Follow all the tutorials that exist on AI today not anything new just until today it's going to probably take me a few lifetime to just go through all of them so I could stand spend like a thousands of years just learning everything that exists I would say like do a bit of research to see what are the top projects that exist in this space right now even the top of my head you could think of all the big models that exist they have their own sdks uh they have integration with something like Lang chain something like llama index something like disp that you can look at and then like top level understand what problems they're solving is this something that is like that you think is a problem sometimes it could be that the things people are saying are problems and trying to solve are not actually real problems that you find find yourself thinking about um or you could look at examples some tutorials and such like few of them not going to the endless loop of reading and watching tutorials but a couple of them just to see what type of problems they're solving and from there I probably move on to something like I want to solve my problem this is my problem that I want to solve how do I use this tool to go about solving this right um so learning anything again people have different ways of learning things I personally am someone who wants to like take something try to do something with it let it completely break until I find my limit or the objects or the tools limit then I kind of find my boundary as well as the tools boundary and that's the way I learn um I would recommend like that is uh that has been really good for me um people have different learning style obviously but I think generally that coming from a use case is usually the better approach in my opinion because it gives you a strong sense of when it's done and then you can try a different use case and try something else tutorials and learning you can just keep on doing it in an endless loop and never get anything actually done I had a question I'm sorry I didn't mean to cut you off yeah sure what's your question um how difficult would it be to um learn on the go as like imagine I'm building a project that I'm unfamiliar with and I'm facing problems and I'm willing to learn as I go how difficult would that be in terms of building AI projects uh I mean that depends like it everything is built up on other things you know so if you have never built anything in the AI space if you're not familiar with python then you are basically dealing with too many different variables right you are trying to sometimes you run into an issue you're not sure if it's a problem with python if it's a problem with the AI Library model you're using or it's a problem with pytorch it's a problem of your IDE right so as many variable as you can limit yourself with that is useful um I'm not saying everybody who has wants to do anything with AI has to like drop everything Learn Python for three years and come back kind of a thing but some general familiarity with like like stuff in Python um so you want to probably build up slowly I would say like spend at least a week getting a strong fundamental of programming Concepts uh that would be a good start so that you kind of uh save yourself from running into endless problems of language rather than the model and AI things itself uh next up would be then like slowly build up right like if you have like an end goal in mind what project you want to build you probably want to build that in part like the whole idea of building MVPs until like every week you want to have something that is currently working and then you add new features on top so that you could always go back to the state it was working in um one thing that helps is that if you are not using git or some sort of Version Control you want to have a running deployed version of it always be up so that you could always go back to a working state of this application it is again how difficult it is it is like a very subjective question depending on the type of problems you're solving how many people have tried to solve similar problems in the past would also mean they would have asked some questions about that specific problem on stack Overflow GitHub on other forums so all of this compound into like how difficult it is going to be but I would say if you have like a generally good like a programming fundamentals already built out you could probably be okay just like trial and error and trying out from pretty much all of these projects yeah I have a question hello H guys if you can ask your questions on the chat I'm sure a lot of people have questions uh but mofia I don't know how much time you have because I want to be respectful I do have to run in about I would say maybe like one or two minutes but uh one or two minutes all right so in that one or two minutes actually I have to ask question I think on behalf of everyone they would find it uh much more uh relevant so uh my purpose for today uh for this actually seven weeks is to open up people's eyes to who they want to become do they want to be a tech leader uh where they're really good at communicating and selling and want they go into management and Leadership you want do they want to be individual contributor maybe start their own open model or like some interesting things and you know for solving curious problems abstract world or they they want to be an entrepreneur so you know talk to customers build so for each of these three tracks track a they have to ship to a th entrepreneur track they have to build something for thousand users put it out there get some feedback it's more so just getting people to show up on a wait list maybe make videos on Tik Tok for distribution track B is you have to go find a startup and then do a backlog ticket for them so have to reach out to maybe 50 startups ask them like hey what are some things that you need and go ahead and do that track C is actually getting an open- Source pull request approved uh by uh by some of our partners so I'm asking you this which three do you think you would be and um what are some you know pros and cons that you see for each of them I mean me personally if I am looking for the easy way out for me I'll probably go the pool request route that's something I already do on day-to-day basis but I think the one of the the one that would be probably the hardest and the most rewarding if it's done it's probably the getting a thousand users to give you feedback um it's just like getting people to try something and not just feedback like oh it's great right we don't need like Instagram feedbacks so like love symbol right we need feedback of this is why I would not pay for this product feedback um and that's something that would actually help give you actionable items to improve rather than just having wow it's so good you want to ask like like what would make you want to give me $1 for this every week or $1 for this every month right like what would this application need to do for you to say I'm willing to increase my subscription to like $5 a month or $10 a month right so that is something like that's where you're trying to understand like what does people value and what what adds value that would probably the hardest thing to actually do um and probably the most valuable as well okay thank you so much Mofi I appreciate your time uh so guys let's some good praise for Mofi again if whatever top stuff that M had shared uh feel free to share that with the rest of your friends so um yeah looks like he headed out all right so I'm gonna answer some quick questions that people may have about the fellowship um I'll just tell you guys this this was uh this was really sudden there's going to be a lot of these type of conversation so a lot of times I'm just going to bring in people who are software Engineers all different types of companies it's up to you to follow us some Discord I'll sometimes send out the email especially if you're accepted but it's up to you to show up to Discord and listen in uh I want to answer some quick Fellowship concerns and uh Q&A so number one about like why did we start this head starter uh program well the starting of Head Start is very closely tied to my own Journey basically my high school teacher said I would never be cut off for computer science he told that to my parents told me to go do sales and then four years later I ended up winning 13 hackathons I fell to aess battin I became a senior software engineer I also went to a boot camps and I got a CS undergrad in three years so the reason I say this is because I think I figured something out and I want to share this with the rest of you guys right I I shared this with my friends they all got good jobs I started like a fellowship to test it out everyone loved it um and now I'm doing this at scale and so I want you guys to be locked in in a time where a lot of people feel like it's a bad Market I think the market is just correcting itself um a lot of my friends are now Founders they've raised millions and millions of dollars and they're hiring two and several of my friends have actually called me multiple times saying hey you got all these students are going through this this this uh Fellowship can we hire from them and I said absolutely I would love for that I think you guys would also tell me if I'm wrong but I think you guys would also love the opportunity to get hired right after a seven seven week Fellowship now some of you guys uh already have internship some of you guys are Masters and PhD students um so uh some of you guys are maybe seniors or Juniors or freshman just starting out everyone is at a different level and what I want to communicate communicate uh to you guys is um kind of like what Head Start is so we're trying to build a number one Community for emerging software Engineers our goal is to create the future shot takers rain makers and Tech leaders and give you guys Direction transparency alongside with consistency and um structure right so these things are very core tenants to head starter and it all starts with the fellowship so in this Fellowship uh the way we're going to break things down is if you don't have team members please make sure to have team members again if you're applying or if you been accepted make sure you have team members you're not going to go through these Sprints if you do not have team members that's a very very uh important bit the second thing uh that you need to know is um uh before I share more tactical things is where do you focus most of your time 20% of the time gives you 80% results where do you focus those 20% of time you want to focus that 20% of time in um in deadlines whenever you have a deadline you want to make sure that you're able to keep up to that deadline right so that is the most important thing so teams deadlines very important and then now I'm going to give you guys a very tactical step-by-step method of how this is going to be broken down so if you go on the Head Start website uh today uh as you guys have already uh this is the website you've seen the different projects that we have so the person who's going to give you these projects um is going to be bill bill is we've had 10,000 people apply to head starter um internship position and Bill was the one we selected we selected one and what makes Bill very unique is Bill has one over 28 hackathons including first place at um uh hack Berkeley AI hacks this three weeks ago and Bill is created videos for you guys to watch and get done uh each week now these are just one of the activities that that are going to be involved but if you want some more details here is how the rest is going to pan out well number one is every week you're going to have a coaching call this coaching call is going to ask you what is your long-term goal as a software engineer this is very very important if if you want to stand out in your interviews if you want to be intentional about your career and literally how much money you make as an entrepreneur or as a software engineer you need to know where you're headed and so in these coaching calls we're going to talk about it's going to be with an AI version of one of our software engineering friends uh and you basically need to discuss what is your long-term goal and then right right after that how are you going to prioritize your task this week so this week what are three things you're going to do that's going to help you get to your goal of becoming that person in three to five years then in subsequent weeks when you do the coaching call we're going to hold you accountable hey did you do those things that you said that you were going to do now if you do not do this coaching call you're not going to have access to the project the project comes out after you this coaching call and in the project you're gonna have um you're GNA have basically videos of Bill walking through the project you'll have some resources and a small little challenge of what to do next after you complete the project we want you to give you we want we want we want you to give us a link uh of your completed project and a video demo of what you did right where you think you would do if you had more time and some struggles that you had along the journey now this project is going to be due Friday and then from Friday till Saturday uh morning we want you to go find two other people and give them feedback so go find two other people and give them feedback on their project right so this is kind of like our goal to make sure that everyone has not just feedback from software engineers in the future but practice giving each other feedback and like listen listening to each other feedback and seeing if you can apply your uh you know uh enhance your kind of presentation your code your skill set whatnot so that's how the projects work on Tuesday and Wednesday you're going to have one mock interview in this mock interview you have to basically get 70% this is mock interview that's going to be with an AI version of a uh an instructor that we've trained on in the last uh few months on actual software Engineers we want to see you ask questions we want to see your problems solve when you organize your thoughts this mock interview is going to be 20 minutes because in a phone interview for software engineering positions you're going to have to solve two medium lead code questions in a span of about 30 35 minutes the first five minutes is for uh introducing yourself the last five minutes is for asking questions to the interviewer they gives you 35 minutes for two technical questions right medium lead code hard right so again we're just our goal for this Fellowship is to take bricks like heavy bricks and just throw it at your face right so that you can get hit and and hard now so that when the the opportunity comes for you to shine actually you're actually able to on Thursday at 800m Eastern time every Thursday we're gonna bring in a panel of software Engineers so we want you to attend this panel live on Zoom there going to be in a zoom call like this and we're going to ask them questions we're GNA ask from from them you know like some tips and we'll ask you guys to ask some questions as well um and then the people that submit their project by Friday they're going to have a demo they're going to get to go to the hackathon on Saturday the hackathons are going to begin 9:00 amm and they're going to conclude on Sunday and so every other weekend there's going to be hackathon every other weekend outside of that it's going to be an in-person uh meet up in your different local also uh there's some other activities here so on Tuesday we want you to reach out to two softw engineers in your Amma Mo on LinkedIn or via email uh we want to see a screenshot of you networking and actually going out there on Wednesday we want to see you uh go meet up with your team either virtually or in person and doesn't have to just your team but also other teams so there's some Community there uh on Thursday uh after the pathways to Tech event we want you to post on social media on Friday uh we want to see uh you give feedback after you your project is submitted on Saturday just give it all your best uh for your hacka fun demo so I'm going to answer some questions that folks are here uh have I'll go into more detail about what this is uh if you don't have too much experience with DSA uh you you will still like we'll kind of give you an idea of what problems you're going to get that week um so that you can kind of practice those problems before you do the mock interview uh so we'll we'll give you some some some we'll give we'll try to give you some practice so that you can prepare that week for the mock interview however like we don't want this to be a mock interview boot camp right we want this to be more focused on your AI projects so we can give you some lessons but those are going to be like uh supplementary uh I would recommend not creating WhatsApp groups for traxxy and these other ones uh I mean they're going to be made anyways but um I mean it's fine uh probably be better if you use um the group Chats on head Shredder or the different IRL groups um okay so uh how were the AI versions trained it actually really cool we trained the AI based on uh software engineering friends that we have so I have over uh we know over 400 software Engineers along with 30 unicorn Founders and we try to work with them on how they interview how they uh teach and how they get feedback uh that's how we created the instructor again it's not a mock interviewer but instructors it's able to teach you once you're stuck um also another thing guys please be active on the Discord and answer each other's questions so people who have questions like you want to answer their questions and you also want to um like these are things that we want to measure right we want to measure how active you are uh why it's important for you uh to share right um all right so I am seeing uh I don't know if there's some more questions have been posted uh what quit spanning the chat yeah please don't add your LinkedIn links here I think like most people are not going to add you if you're not adding others so very few people are going to click on all the LinkedIn links so might not be a good idea to share your LinkedIn links here um so let me just [Music] see uh will we have enough processing power to train our own AI or I mean everything you do is going to be on your own like on your own accord right so anything addition we give you is like a bonus but you should try your best to just uh you know like do whatever you can within your own capacity um so let's see what else is there uh you're going to get a headart login later so don't worry about that right now I would say don't even just forget about head starter just be focused on your fellowship um and so you should be the prerequisite for this Fellowship is you should know at least one programming language you have enough time uh to dedicate to it so those are kind of like important as well um do we have to attend all the hackathons every weekend the hackathon is are gonna be every other weekend and yes if you don't have a job and you're not giving everything you can uh you should be you know you shouldn't be complicit with yourself until you uh do do your best how much do certifications help I don't believe in certifications even though at the end of this uh head starter program you're going to get the ability to pitch to a real software engineer oneon-one or like your group to that software engineer and if that software engineer thinks you're did a good job you will get a CER you will get like a like an approval right so the what I care about is not the certificate but what I care about is were you successfully able to convince and defend your your your project to a kind of committee right like to an IND Committee of one so do certification in general help no I don't think so certificates in general um uh I think sometimes try to be like a shortcut uh and uh they might be more applicable in cyber security and it Fields but not here the first project is due next Friday not this Friday you have two certifications right I saw on your LinkedIn one is the clouds architect and the solutions archit from AWS I have two certifications correct I do have two certifications I why did you say was patents huh why did you say was patents then CU I have patents as well oh okay I thought I got confused for a second what the patents uh I can answer that qu uh I mean since you're asking patents um basically I found a way to find for every single GitHub repo at Capital One and basically any any big company and big companies have like tens of thousands Capital One had like 10,000 GitHub repos I found a way to find the a cost per service per day per GitHub repo uh and find ways to like replace those with more more efficient aiss architecture patterns so that's didn't exist by any company and so we file two patents on it okay congratulations thanks are there multiple attempts for the mock interiew uh uh yes they will be uh they'll be uh we're not sure if we'll give you multiple attempts that kind of um uh to to choose a track you have to complete your if you got accepted to choose a track you have to complete the accepted um uh like Fellowship form I'll answer like two or three questions right now like live on mic and then like that should be good so I thought I saw John like what's your question John yes and can I speak to you for a minute yeah what's up and when you guys ask your questions try to be like brief as fast as possible like just be really quick with your question yeah sure asalam alikum fle uh uh I want to know that what if I like don't get into your fellowship program but can I still be able to see through the course cont like many people are applying and there may be a chance of high rejection but what if we don't make into your program so is there any chance that we can like see the course contents and do it by ourselves uh yeah it's a great question so uh we are still kind of thinking about that right now if you get rejected you're not going to have access to the course so if you do get rejected um you won't you won't get you won't have a course and people who basically are getting rejected of people who we think are don't have high signal or haven't uh demonstrated enough effort right so we look for effort in different ways um and if someone who really really wants this and actively participating in Discord and other communities uh it should be easy for us to proceed okay can I have something yeah what's up NE sorry yeah I your first point was uh we should have a group uh initially that's like a must uh if we don't get a group is that like you know dang we're on our own now or you you got to have a group without a group uh this is not going to really work out all right thank you uh I had I had two questions uh yeah so so the first one was uh how did Bill get into 23 hackathons I mean I've been trying to find hackathons lately and they're just.com or you go to ml. hackathons uh Bill didn't go to 23 he went to 4 and he won 28 he went to 40 dang um also one more thing how did you go about building that network of unicorns and for of unicorn Founders and you know no one Network's better than I yeah how do you okay you gotta you got you gotta tell me how you do it that's what that's what we're gonna do in the next seven weeks perfect looking forward to it you question Let's do let's do Brandon so Brandon what's your question yes so right now I'm building out a social media app that's like Twitter Reddit is very close to production um because I have a Capstone project due in August um so I was thinking about like killing two birds with one stone my teammates aren't uh able to join the head starter program because they have a lot on their plates so it's just me but eventually I want to actually push this as actual like company idea um if we have an idea like this and we want to have like IP protection on that idea it is a corporate say artificial intelligence um is there a way to do that through this program or would we have to would it be better to just start a whole new project uh I'm try try to understand your question like do you want to help with with patenting your idea opportunity to uh build your project like two birds or one stone so I have a existing project um I wanted to see if there's a way to build out a a team further with that same project um but also have some type of I protection for the team if I protection means that they don't take your ID and run with it yeah just make them sign ND as a non-compete and you're good okay I can give you templates for that yes I I would appreciate that yeah I'll I'll follow with you afterward sounds uh shash shank what's up what's your question yeah thanks so much so I'm an international student and I just wanted to know do we require a CPD for this Fellowship because I know like we are not getting paid but for like track we'll be like if if it says like $1,000 in Revenue so like oh okay I see so um basically you can make Revenue right uh if you're a CBD student so we will try to give you like a form so that you can have like an offer letter and you can use the offer letter to you know got it and by when can I expect that because uh I can't start Fellowship like unless I get the CPD uh we will try to get you something by today or tomorrow okay got it thank you so much um hello my name is uh let me select the next person on this list so V hello Vito or v um yeah so my basic question was uh this happened to a lot of people in Discord too there's a secondary email saying to reapply we ignore that right after we got accepted yeah please re uh I'm sending all emails myself so please ignore that okay thank you I just want to make even if we do it accident it just like I just kept on getting like multiple I think I got two of those I just want to make sure we ignore those after getting acceptance so that's it right well uh someone to ask a question I don't know if someone ask a question uh Rejoice Coy you have a question I have to leave yes I have a question my name is Rejoice yeah um so um I have a question because I'm seeing that everybody's asking questions regarding track a or C and nobody is really saying anything about track B because we have to build projects that has to do with confidence so I have questions like how can we get the the folder that you spoke about to for each um schedule for each day and then you said if we don't complete some stuff we cannot start our project so I just want to know how we can get like those information to us uh so it what are you track B yeah I chose track B okay so you want some more questions you have some more questions around track B correct yeah okay so uh for track B um the questions that you have need to um I don't know what your questions for track be we'll give you more information via email so just just stay posted uh for so because you also made mention that if we don't um complete some of those um forms or some something online we cannot that's a coaching call so you're gonna get an you're gonna get an email I mean sorry you're gonna get an email with the link to our platform and every week you're going to have a set of lessons assigned to you on our platform and the first thing you have to do is a coaching call if you do not do the coaching call you're not going to get the project if that makesense and then number two um do do people who are working on track B like projects for companes do we also need to work in group or can we work like IND everyone everyone has to work in a group okay so we have to find people who would actually work alongside with us correct can we also choose someone that is not like accepted in the program or was it someone accepted in the program ideally you want someone who accepted in the program all right thank you so much hello yeah so I have this question uh like for the international students who chose track be right which involves handling startup backlogs and working on business requirements like how can you proceed without the CPT like uh what should we tell USCIS to ensure we meet the requirements for the track B because my coop adviser asked me to apply for the CPT as soon as possible because our this uh Fellowship is going to start from July second right and yeah she asked me to schedule a meeting with her and like I need to answer the questions which which she going to ask me uh we we'll send you a form of your CBT so don't worry about that we'll send you like some offer letter or something that you can use um official thing uh for the thank you so much well like takes two weeks what takes two weeks for the CPT approval I already have my CPT for another internship that I'm doing and right now I'm in middle of the internship and can't transfer my CPT also so like technically you don't like when you take an online course or watch UD Demi video uh or YouTube video you don't need a CPT for that right but we are creating an experience for you so you want to put this on your experience section your resume software engineering Head Start fellow and so um I from what I understand is like anyone doing track b or a or even C and if there's any monetary reward for that you're not able to cash that in unless have like your offer right so track those tracks are not going to begin until like the last two weeks so or like you're not going to make any money technically until the last two weeks if there's any money to be made so um uh in in that case uh even if it takes two weeks you should be in the clear you should still be able to do the Head Start assignments um is and hopefully you know if you are someone who needs CBT you'll be fine by that okay I have one question so you said like uh CPT part like doesn't start until the last two weeks so I have a current internship that and my current CPT ends on August 20 so can I get a CPT from August 20 to end of the fellowship like September 15 right uh that's too specific I think we're just going to give a general thing and uh if it works for everyone we'll just hopefully works with you as well okay I have a question so I follow up uh like uh offer letters I just can't do a followup questions so just uh ask on the Discord or something maybe I'll create a channel called like CPT or something you guys can ask all the CPT questions in the disc first of all you where do we submit assignments when we're done uh you'll be given a link so if you'll be given a link where uh again we'll email you all this information so you have just check your email upcoming like three days hey your I had a question so uh when choosing my track I chose track a but uh I was like thinking of switching to track c um my I was talking with my teammate as well he was he wanted to switch to track C2 so if I had to do that like would I have to go back to that link and like reister like after the uh we will create an option for you to switch to track C or update track I have a question uh so um for AI um you wanted us to do some AI projects to start off you think you should practice like getting it running in our console log like either with the processor being remote or like on our PC uh this is the last question I have have to head out after this so um regarding the AI I'm actually not sure what your question is I I would just say like um like you don't run AI right you make connections to AI apis or you you like host your own large language model on a cloud provider sometimes you can also host it on your own on on Console I would just say yeah just try to like practice projects like just whatever you can do beforehand to prepare is great um so uh we're here to give you direction we want to give you direction from July 22 so right now we're just Gathering Together what's going to give you what you know what's going to be best for you and what is the most important thing I want everyone here to take away is please be active in the Discord please check your emails and if you have team members who apply to head starter make sure make sure that we know that they appli to head starter that's very important and uh if you have team members that have not applied but you listed them make sure either on part two or in your acceptances make sure that they're also coming here and participating cool could I ask you one could I ask you one last question I'm so sorry about that um I ended up with five team members I got a lot of my people to apply and most of them ended up getting accepted as of right now I have four people in my team the fifth one he's able to find team and so I'm wondering if I could just like make like a five Man team if that's okay no you can't for is Max fors Max dang it all right thank you all right guys guys I have a question I question I hate to do this but we'll back just I got I just got aced and I'm getting a lot of smes being like please fill the part two do I need to if you already been accepted as a fellow and you got some more subsequent emails whether it's something that you saw yesterday or something you saw today if you've already gotten accepted please ignore those emails again if you what what is the minimum number for the team four four is Max three three to four members yeah H it's fine thank you guys all questions will be taken on the Discord thank you so much for being here we'll see each other again tomorrow take care all right thanks so much have you day thank you thank you guys I I have a question fre