Back in college, I managed to finish my final project in less than two weeks leaving me plenty of free time. Once my friends found out about this, they started knocking at my door, desperate for help with their own projects (okay, a bit dramatic, but you get the idea!). Intrigued with the opportunity to learn about many unknown, scientifically-unique projects, I officially opened a workshop in my house. 

I helped both in technical things (re: code) as well as report writing. Disclaimer: as far as I understood, I didn’t cross any ethical lines as most of the time I’d guide them with suggestions, sometimes contribute a bit of code, but never do everything for them, and foremost I made sure my friend understood what they created & wrote. This was a labor of friendship, not profit—my “payment” was often cakes or, more commonly, a mandatory FIFA match as part of the consultation deal. One of the most interesting projects is my wife’s (then girlfriend), which is to build a search engine for Quran verses, but the queries and the verses need to be normalized with Indonesian-spelling first. Made with PHP 6 years ago together with my wife, now, I have decided to re-write it into Python as this is my most starred (re: 2 stars) GitHub repo yet!

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