About me

Computer Science MSc student at IST, full-stack problem solver, and lifelong learner.

Hi, I'm Luís Rosa. I'm currently pursuing a Master's in Computer Science and Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. Before IST I completed a Bachelor's in Computer Engineering at the University of Algarve with a final grade of 15/20.

What drives me is flexibility across the whole stack. My projects span distributed systems (a permissioned blockchain with Byzantine-fault-tolerant consensus, a horizontally-scalable key-value store with autoscaling and observability), data engineering and analytics (a UK property warehouse with star schema, ETL, and an OLAP cube), machine learning (neural networks built from scratch, classifiers and time-series models for real-world problems), compilers (a complete lexer, parser, semantic analyzer, code generator, and stack VM), and full-stack web (React + TypeScript apps, PHP banking platforms, Express APIs). Whatever the layer, I want to understand how the pieces fit and how to ship something that actually works.

I'm equally comfortable in a cloud-native setting, wiring together Docker, Nginx, Redis, RabbitMQ, CockroachDB, and a Prometheus/Grafana stack, as I am writing pure-Java code with no dependencies. The common thread is end-to-end ownership.

What I'm up to

MSc coursework at IST:

• Completed courses: Advanced Programming, High-Reliability Systems, Data Science, Data Analysis and Integration, Cybersecurity Forensics.
• Currently taking courses: Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Cloud Computing and Virtualization.

Outside the curriculum, I independently develop and publish a wide range of projects on GitHub, covering distributed systems, blockchain consensus, neural networks, compilers, physics engines, and full-stack apps.

How I work

• End-to-end mindset. From data ingestion through ETL, modeling, serving, and observability, I like owning the whole pipeline.
• Build it from scratch first. I learn by re-implementing things (a neural network, a Byzantine-fault-tolerant consensus algorithm, a compiler, a physics engine) before reaching for a framework.
• Comfortable in multidisciplinary teams. Happy to mentor, happy to learn, with a high tolerance for hairy problems.

Outside code

When I'm not coding, I'm reading about distributed systems and sketching ideas for the next side project. I speak Portuguese (native, C2) and English (B2).

If any of this resonates and you'd like to collaborate or chat, get in touch.