How to ask for a recommendation

“Ask whether I can write you a good letter, not whether I’m willing to write one.”Geoff Kuenning

So you have just finished a project or thesis or course with me, and want me to write a recommendation for you? Perhaps for a job or higher education application. Here are quick guidelines (for both BSc and MSc works):

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Reflection on organizing CompSys 2021

CompSys is the Dutch local flagship conference (https://www.compsys.science/) where Dutch PhD students and researchers showcase their research. It is held annually, and this year I organized the conference. This year also, it was the first time that the conference was organized online. For me it was a unique experience to organize and run the conference.

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My experience with 6 months of online teaching

I have been teaching online from September 2020 till March 2021. During this time, I started two new courses - Advanced Network Programming and Storage Systems, and continued running a paper reading seminar Advanced Topics in Distributed Systems. Due to their nature (seminar, lecture with programming homework), all three courses entailed a very different nature of interaction with students. Let me summarize my experience with these classes and my general experience and struggles.

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How to run Crail File System locally using netty

In this blog post I am going to show how to run Crail file system (CrailFS) from www.crail.io (github) locally on your laptop using its netty binding.

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How does Apache Spark read a parquet file

In this post I will try to explain what happens when Apache Spark tries to read a parquet file. Apache Parquet is a popular columnar storage format which stores its data as a bunch of files. Typically these files are stored on HDFS. In a seprate post I will explain more details about the internals of Parquet, but for here we focus on what happens when you call

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