Andrei Gramescu, computing enthusiast

3nd Year at Imperial College
Department of Computing
London, UK

Academics

My profesional journey starts in South Kensington, at Imperial College. This is the place where I have the privilege of pursuing a Masters in Computer Science and am now in the penultimate year of my degree. Studying here placed me in a highly demanding environment, where my discipline and resilience are tested to their limits, and where I never stop learning from a network of skilled peers. I have finished both years with solid firsts and will undoubtedly continue studying hard in the next years to come, as my passion for what I do continues to grow.

I also enjoy working as a Lab Teaching Assistant and a Personal Programming Tutor within my department. Both involve helping younger students with the programming module and the weekly coursework. The former is conducted during lab sessions and is usually concerned with shorter questions. The latter involves marking weekly coursework and committing to performing one hour a week of teaching to a dedicated group of 8 first years. Both jobs allow me to fine tune my communication skills and constantly train the way I explain code to other people, especially newcomers.

With very few exceptions, I can confidently say that I've enjoyed all the modules so far. I've experienced the benefits that breadth of knowledge gave me both during university projects and the summer internship. Having said that, there are still some module that I found especially appealing in both years of study:

Computing Practical (Haskell, Java and C)
Discrete Mathematics
Databases
Computer Architecture
Logic

Operating Systems
Computational Techniques
Algorithm Design and Analysis
Software Engineering Design
Networks and Communications

StarLeaf internship

Cambridge | June-September, 2021

What a summer, and what an experience. Working in the StarLeaf App team was fun, engaging and has challenged and reshaped my perspective on Software Engineering from university. I gained valuable experience in providing real-world, reliable, software solutions to problems in a production system, of scales I have not encountered before. This was my first time working in a software organisation, which meant I had to adapt to a large codebase that people have worked on for many years. I've had the pleasure of architecting and building two projects, during which I've expanded my skill set, and learned valuable lessons.

Mac ProblemReporter

The ProblemReporter is an executable that users receive from the support team when they're having issues with the app. It acts like a troubleshooter, running a bunch of diagnostics that are both system-wide and StarLeaf specific and sends them over to an internal server. This was designed to compile and work only for Windows and my job was to get it working for macOS, as well as add more functionality, when requested. I refactored the code for it in a way that would make it as easy as possible to add new diagnostics, which makes it very easy to extend and distribute when a serious bug occurs.

Application-Wide Testing Framework

After finishing the ProblemReporter, I transitioned into working on a set of tools that would allow testing of the entire application component, which in turn was split into multiple subcomponents. The point of this framework was to make it easy to test the client, without the cloud (a giant monolyth that proved to be inconvenient for testing the app): specify an app-cloud realtime interaction that would run in parallel with a set of UI actions, and then perform assertions on the UI side. This involved setting up the UI tests and the realtime StarLeaf cloud simulator, writing support code for driving the app-cloud protocols, as well as providing scripts and documentation for setting up the environemt and bringing it all together. The result is a framework that allows the App team to easily create and run reliable, cloudless tests on the StarLeaf App, something that is now used for both new features and protecting against regressions.

Scala

WACC Compiler

University coursework

Try it out online

WACC is a programming language for which we had to write a full compiler (with target ARM11) as part of the Second Year second term group project. The first two tasks involved writing a robust front-end (featuring parsing and semantic analysis as well as producing useful and expressive error messages) and a back-end for assembly generation that could also handle IO operations, stack / heap allocation and WACC runtime errors. The last task of the project was to extend the fairly limited language (unexpandable set of types, capable of only primitives, pairs and arrays, no garbage collection or support for functional programming patterns, to name a few) and add our own spin to it. My team and I settled on higher-order functions, lambda syntax , match statements and custom typing: the Unit type (semantics very similar to Haskell's Void), aliases, sum types, function types and recursive types.

C

The Pintos Operating System

University coursework

Not allowed to share

An operating system built as part of the Second Year first term group project, touching on many advanced concepts. We implemented a scheduling system for Pintos using two methods: priority donations and a multi level feedback queue. The Userprog task required implementing the process arg and stack setup, a good deal of system calls, including wait and exec , pagefaults and pointer management. Finally, implementing virtual memory involved paging, lazy loading, moving to swap, an efficient eviction algorithm, and solving an uncountable amount of deadlocks, memory leaks and race conditions.

GoForth

Personal project

GitHub repo

A Forth interpreter and runtime environment built in collaboration with Liam. Forth is a fun, stack-oriented language used in embedded systems.

Mandelbrot Set Renderer

University coursework

GitHub repo

A Mandelbrot Set Renderer that enables the user to zoom in its infinite complexity. The calculations are done on the GPU using the OpenGL API. See video.

ARM11 Assembler and Emulator

University coursework

Not allowed to share

As part of the 3rd Term coursework, we made an emulator supporting a subset of an ARM11 processor’s instructions as well as an assembler for the same computer architecture.

Web development
and design

In the past, I've built both:

Clean, elegant and fast Front-ends

that are responsive, easy to use and navigate and as accessible as possible to everyone on the web

Robust, restful APIs and Back-ends

with authentication, authorization, file-uploads, sending emails and CRUD operations with databases

The last web project that I worked on was part of a university module: designing for real people. This team project was heavily focused on our ability to interact with potential users of our app. I got to practice the way I approach the entire process of building a web service: understanding the problem, prototyping with meaningful mockups, user stories, thin slicing and applying useful metrics.