[MENTEE]

[julian-fong]

Mentee:
Julian Fong, Github

Mentor(s):
@fkiraly , @kirilral , @yarnabrina

Why did you join sktime's mentorship program?

I joined sktime's mentorship program in order to learn how to do collaborative software development in an open source environment. I am eager to learn many things and am excited to contribute my time and effort to improve the amazing library that sktime has built. I hope by being in this mentorship program I can improve my development/coding skills and learn how to work in a team of other developers.

What topics are you working on?

The scope of my project that I will be working on during sktime is scaling, backends, foundation models - polars, pytorch, huggingface.

During the beginning of my mentorship at sktime, I will be primarily working on the two prs:
sktime/skpro#342
sktime/sktime#6263

The coordination thread can be found here: sktime/sktime#6381

What are your learning goals?

My learning goals are:

• Have a solid understanding on Python software development
• Be able to construct and interface deep learning or machine learning models in an api structured format for time series analysis
• Have a strong foundation in parallel and distributed backends, and the knowledge to incorporate various mtypes (pandas, polars dataframes) inside the sktime library

What's next for you after the mentorship program?

I plan on continuing to contribute to sktime where-ever I can, and to incorporate my newly gained knowledge from the mentorship onto other projects!