teaching

LSDE – Large-Scale Data Engineering (TA, 2022)

I was a Teaching Assistant for the Large-Scale Data Engineering (LSDE) course at VU Amsterdam in its final iteration in 2022.
🔗 Course website

Interestingly, I had taken this same course as a student at VU Amsterdam and later returned to participate in it as a TA. To me, LSDE was the best course offered at VU—a course where you could truly build something.

What made LSDE special were its two assignments. The first assignment introduced students to the art of query optimization through competition. You’d start with a simple SQL query running in 300 milliseconds, and by the end, you’d realize it’s possible to bring it down to under 0.01 milliseconds—just through careful optimization. This experience motivated me to pursue a master’s thesis at CWI and continue there as a PhD and now PostDoc.

The second assignment focused on processing real big data to extract insights. You can check out my project from 2018 here:
📄 Group 14 Project (PDF) — very proud of myself and our team.