Mahir Emran

Computer Science @ University of Washington

Hey, I'm Mahir! I'm a CS student at UW (currently second year). You can see the courses I've taken here, as well as other languages/tools/frameworks I'm familiar with. I'm interested in computer systems, especially embedded systems and operating systems.

I like working on the interfaces that a system has to deal with, like connecting software to hardware, figuring out how things communicate, and testing that it all works together. A lot of that work for me happens on satellites and rockets. Hopefully in the future I'll get to apply this to cloud and server architecture :D.

Stuff I do

At Husky Satellite Lab, I lead command and data handling work on the HS-2 flight computer team. We're building a 3U CubeSat that focuses on using images to navigate (as in determine your orbit) instead of traditional sensors, and I spent summer 2026 with the lab as an avionics intern. I've worked on flight computer software and hardware, ground systems, testing, and things like making our tracking software work on an embedded system. I also worked on the flight computer memory design (unfortunately, it was too complicated to implement in our PCB, but it was cool to stare at). Here are some CDR documents I worked on.

I'm also on the avionics team at SARP, where I work on onboard systems software for the Domecracker rocket. I've worked on bare-metal STM32 software peripherals (PWM, UART, SPI), device drivers (error logging, silicon labs radio, actuator, temperature sensors, etc), and how the flight computer talks to the rest of the rocket (state machine). You can take a look at the Titan repository.

Most recently, I'm a teaching assistant for operating systems (CSE 451). I help students with kernel projects and concepts like virtual memory, synchronization, and file systems, and debug tricky concurrency issues :P

Some previous projects include:

• Simplex Conference: I was the technical lead for a Flutter and Firebase app that helped conference attendees (e.g. FBLA, TSA, DECA) keep up with schedules, announcements, and events. Ended up getting ~$3000 from WAFBLA via contract for their state conference.
• xk kernel: Worked on parts of an operating system, including process management, file systems, memory allocation, and trap handling.
• Multi-threaded HTTP Search Engine: Built a C++ search engine with on-disk inverted indexes and a multithreaded HTTP server.
• Data center systems: Built a microservices-based server and explored performance analysis, queuing theory, and storage and cache optimizations.
• Natural language processing: Implemented n-gram language models and feedforward neural networks (FFNs).

I'm too lazy to vibecode some slop website so instead we have this. Just <100 lines of good old HTML