Reflection on presentations from Prewald and HuggingFace

Listening to the Prewald and Hugging Face teams this week was both inspiring and a bit intimidating. Each group showed high-quality work and strong technical skills, proving how much you can get done in a semester when you work closely together and move quickly. They clearly explained their problems, showed working demos, and even adjusted on the spot, which really highlighted the fast pace of an open-source project.

Prewald stood out with their full debugger feature. Their live demo, where they stepped through code, looked at variable values, and traced execution, felt like a mini-IDE built on top of a complex codebase. What impressed me most was how they paired up front-end and back-end developers from the start. Those small teams handed off work smoothly and kept their momentum high, even when requirements changed. They even made phone calls with the maintainers, which was a really great networking opportunities to some extent.

Hugging Face, on the other hand, took us into the world of transformers and CI pipelines—areas that I had not worked with before. I could see they were experienced at machine learning related field and really combined what they learned into real-world project. They broke down their work into simple diagrams of data flow and training steps, and they even showed how their pull-request speed improved over time.

Seeing these two groups raise the bar has definitely put more pressure on us for our presentation next week—but in a good way. Their demos reminded us that clear documentation, small, focused tasks, and using existing tools wherever possible can make a huge difference. We’re now motivated to tighten our slides, polish our demos, and maybe even sneak in an extra feature. If Prewald and Hugging Face can accomplish so much in a few months, we owe it to ourselves to give it our all.

Progress on our group

This weekend our team made some real progress: we successfully merged two front-end pull requests that add the form validation flow and the responsive dashboard widget. We also submitted a back-end pull request over the weekend, which was such a big job for us because we had stuck on this issue for a long time. On top of that, we’ve sketched out and rehearsed our slide deck for next week’s presentation, so we’re heading into Monday with both solid code deliverables and a polished presentation.