Computer Science · ETH Zurich

Hi, I'm Hafsa.
I build apps people use, and I like making software fast.

I'm a master's student in Computer Science at ETH Zurich, focusing on data management systems and software engineering. I design, build and ship my own apps from the first sketch to the app store.

View projects Download CV

About

I'm based in Zurich and study Computer Science at ETH Zurich, where I also did my bachelor's. My master's major is Data Management Systems, with a minor in Programming Languages & Software Engineering.

I enjoy the whole path of a product: working out the data model, writing the tests, setting up CI, and getting the app into people's hands. Three of my apps are live or about to launch. At university I lean towards systems and performance: vectorising kernels by hand, scheduling workloads in the cloud, and understanding what the hardware is actually doing.

Since 2024 I've been a teaching assistant for Digital Design and Computer Architecture, helping students through their first steps with Verilog, MIPS assembly and FPGAs.

Based in
Zurich, Switzerland
Studying
MSc Computer Science, ETH Zurich
Focus
Data systems, software engineering, performance
Languages
German (native), English (fluent), French (basic)

Projects

Apps I've designed, built and released myself.

Salah Calendar banner: a calendar that schedules around your prayers

Salah Calendar

A calendar that schedules around your prayers.

Most prayer apps show a timetable. Salah Calendar places the five daily prayers as real blocks inside their valid time windows, around the meetings you actually have, and re-plans whenever your day changes.

  • Two-way Google Calendar sync and cloud push reminders, built on Supabase Edge Functions
  • A constraint-based scheduling assistant that finds slots around events, prayers and protected time
  • Prayer-time engine with 15 calculation methods, tested against the adhan library
  • Offline-first PWA and Android app, 150+ automated tests
  • React
  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • Deno
  • PWA
  • Capacitor
  • Vitest
salahcalendar.app
KnowHouse banner: share the chores, keep the know-how

KnowHouse

Share the chores. Keep the know-how.

A family app for household tasks: assign and accept to-dos, earn points, climb the leaderboard and keep instructions for how things are done at home. It started as a team project and is now published on Google Play.

  • Real-time collaboration, shared calendar, personalised task recommendations and user profiles
  • 200+ unit, provider and widget tests
  • CI/CD with GitHub Actions: every release is versioned, signed and uploaded to Google Play automatically
  • Flutter
  • Dart
  • Firebase
  • Firestore
  • GitHub Actions
getknowhouse.com
Shax banner: the Somali board game

Shax

The traditional Somali board game.

A digital version of Shax, a two-player strategy game related to Nine Men's Morris. Play offline against the computer or a friend on the same device, in English, German or Somali.

  • Minimax game AI with three difficulty levels
  • The full traditional rules, including the removal phase and the Oodan rule
  • One Flutter codebase for Android, iOS and the web, with automated signed releases
  • Flutter
  • Dart
  • Game AI
  • i18n
  • GitHub Actions
shax.app

University work

FastGATr

1500× faster than naive C++ · 1.7–4.5× faster than the optimised PyTorch reference

Optimised a geometric algebra transformer on Apple M1. Exploited structure-tensor sparsity with generated kernels (about 140× fewer operations), added ILP, operator fusion and cache-aware weight repacking, and hand-vectorised the hot loops with NEON intrinsics.

  • C++
  • Python
  • ARM NEON SIMD

Cloud workload scheduling

Latency-sensitive and batch jobs sharing one cluster

Built schedulers that co-locate memcached with PARSEC batch workloads. Measured resource interference with iBench and PARSEC scalability, then used the results to schedule on a heterogeneous VM cluster (static load) and on a single machine (dynamic load).

  • Google Cloud
  • Kubernetes
  • Kops
  • Python

Bachelor Thesis: XRAY+

300,000+ automated test cases on AXI interconnects

Written at ETH Zurich's Secure and Trustworthy Systems Group. Extended XRAY, a tool for security analysis of AXI interconnects, with new execution modes and security properties, which uncovered previously unknown security vulnerabilities. Automated large-scale testing with a TCL pipeline script running over 300,000 test cases on different AXI interconnects.

  • Verilog
  • SystemVerilog
  • Vivado
  • TCL

Experience & education

  1. 2025 – 2027

    MSc Computer Science · ETH Zurich

    Major in Data Management Systems, minor in Programming Languages & Software Engineering. Courses include Big Data, Cloud Computing Architecture, Advanced Systems Lab, Concepts of Object-Oriented Programming and AI in Education.

  2. 2024 – 2026 (spring)

    Teaching Assistant · ETH Zurich

    Digital Design and Computer Architecture. Guided students through 10 hands-on lab sessions on digital circuit design, Verilog, MIPS assembly, FPGAs and system integration, and reviewed their lab submissions with feedback.

  3. 2022 – 2025

    BSc Computer Science · ETH Zurich

    GPA 5.15 / 6. Bachelor's thesis at the Secure and Trustworthy Systems Group (6 / 6). Courses include Parallel Programming, Systems Programming, Operating Systems, Computer Networks, Compiler Design, Data Modeling and Databases, Information Retrieval and Machine Learning.

Skills

Languages

  • Java
  • Dart
  • C
  • C++
  • Python
  • JavaScript
  • SQL
  • OCaml
  • Haskell
  • Verilog
  • SystemVerilog
  • TCL
  • HTML/CSS

Frameworks & tools

  • Flutter
  • Firebase
  • React
  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • PyTorch
  • Kubernetes
  • Google Cloud
  • GitHub Actions
  • Git
  • Vivado

Contact

Whether it's about a role, a project or one of my apps, I'd be glad to hear from you.

hafsasheikh203@gmail.com LinkedIn GitHub Download CV