Thesis supervisor. It was a speech transformer. There's a lot of complex parts. He taught me to break it down into different parts, like input, output, and splitting components into black boxes. Speech is very complex, so what we did was just extract certain parts that were most impactful instead of getting it perfect.

He also taught me to take inspiration from different sources instead of trying to be too clever and retry everything from scratch. There's the meme that developers just copy paste stuff from Stack Overflow, but engineering is really just building on the shoulders of giants. There's usually ego involved in trying to figure someone out without seeing what others have done.