A lucky year

This is my first “serious” entry for the Not-so-quantum bits blog, and I wanted to start by reflecting a bit on the last year (2023). In particular, I want to discuss something that I heard repeated a couple of times over the last months. And that is how “lucky” I was this year.

Work

I guess my lucky year started when I joined IQM last december. When I first applied, I really did not have high expectations on getting accepted. I actually even doubted whether or not to send my application since it was outside of the deadline. I am also sure they received many very good applications from people who at that point were better prepared than I was. Maybe it was my thesis on open quantum systems? Or my brief experience as a front-end developer? For \(x\) or \(y\) reason, I was given the chance to work at IQM, and I sure did not let it go to waste. I sometimes take for granted how much I have learned from my colleagues in the last year, but looking back to when I first applied, I can definitely recognize the high degree of the polynomial that my learning curve followed. Maybe even exponential (?) 😝. I am just really lucky to have such outstanding colleagues, from whom I can learn so much.

Hackathons

My next strike of luck came when together with some good friends of mine - Lion Frangoulis, Emily Haworth, and Fiona Fröhler (who was replaced by Aaron Sander for the hackathon) - we participated in the QHack by Pennylane. If you have taken a look at the rest of my website, you probably already know how this went. Funny enough, we only decided to participate in the hackathon after we achieved top 20 on the coding challenges -which btw costed me a few sleepless nights- even though we signed up “just for fun”. I guess our thought process went something like “sure, might as well use the power-ups we got” and “the price looks kinda good”. And just like that, we spent an entire weekend setting everything up and trying to get the cluster working for our simulations. The rest is history (git history 😜). Just how lucky is it that the people you enjoy hanging out with have the right skills and knowledge to move the project forward?

Open Source

Later on, sometime around my birthday, I participated in the Unitary Hack. This is the point in time to which my mind always goes back when people mention my luck. My idea going into it was “surely there are many seasoned developers out there who are way better than me, so let me just try to learn as much as I can”. And so, I stumbled upon two challenges that caught my eye. One by Qutip, and one by Pennylane. Just the fact that I managed to close the Pennylane issue is quite lucky, since I basically worked in parallel with another hacker who actually open a PR a few hours before I did. I was just lucky enough to push through the project with more add-ons than they did -see what I did there with the pun 😌? And oh my, I could not imagine the repercusions of this. I just thought I would get some bounties to my pocket 💸 and go home with a cool certificate. But time would prove me wrong.

EXTRA: After participating in the unitary hack, I got to exchange a nice email with Nate Stemen, from whom (together with J. Izaac) I got the idea of creating my own github README and personal website (so if you like this you know who to thank 😝).

Shortly after this, I got a lucky email from someone who either directly or indirectly helped me inmensely during this year, Ivana Kurecic. After an initial meeting, they offered me the amazing opportunity of writing a blog post for Pennylane talking about my experience in the open source world. If you are interested in this story, feel free to read my other entry 😉. I could not believe what was going on! And if that was not enough, I was then put in contact with Isaac de Vlugt to feature in Pennylane’s podcast “Between two kets”. Yes, me, Emiliano, … HOW?! Writing about this now it all seems so sureal, and it definitely was a sureal experience. I just felt really … lucky.

End of year

A couple of months passed by. I got involved in more projects at work, I got more and more engaged on my master’s thesis work, and I started to deal with the consequences of ignoring my health in all the previous months (I will probably talk about this in a future entry). But just a month before the year ended, I got two extraordinary news: I had gotten accepted in a great Phd, and I was accepted in the Xanadu Residency program 🥳! How lucky could I be?

Just luck?

As I mentioned several times, I think I was really lucky this year. I was lucky to be given opportunities, I was lucky to work with great people, I was lucky to make the right decisions, I was lucky to be recognized by people who helped me grow even more, and I was lucky to have people around me who cared for and supported me (E.H & F.F ❤️). But, was it really just luck? I would like to think that I brought that luck to myself, that I worked for it. It certainly felt like so much more than just luck, to my body and mind at least. Maybe the philosopher Seneca was right:

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

This same idea brings me back to when I was in primary school and I asked my father “will my efforts ever pay off?”, to which he answered (something like):

“Your effort is like bamboo, you are now developing strong foundations, which will take you many years without seeing much progress. But after this period is over, you will start to see the results grow much much faster than you could ever imagine”.

So maybe this year was just this period where I am finally seeing the results of my efforts (?).

Luck, bamboo, opportunity, or whatever it may be, I feel extremely grateful for this year, and I can only hope that next year will be as full of growth, health, and happiness. Who knows, it might be even better than this year, with a bit of luck.