Abutalib-Barish Namazov

My name is Abutalib but I go by Barish. I graduated from MIT in May 2024 with an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering, and I’m now a PhD student at MIT CSAIL in the Software Design Group. Reach me at [email protected].

Work & Research

I’ve worked at organizations both large and small. From July 2024 to August 2025 I was a research engineer at Citadel / GQS, where I’d also interned as a software engineer in summer 2023; before that came a summer at Microsoft in 2022.

Outside of industry, I run a few projects that a lot of educational centers rely on, and I helped build Fuiz, a Kahoot-like platform for collaborative learning.

These days I write about what I’m working on in the atelier. Earlier projects include Kodless, built for my SuperUROP with Daniel Jackson to bring concepts to web development; HCI work with Lea Verou in 2022–2023; and a control system for an ion source experiment with Daniel Winklehner in 2021.

Teaching

Teaching has been one of my biggest passions since 2016, when I started out with math and programming for students in Azerbaijan. Now I help train students for programming competitions and teach a group of volunteers how to teach.

At MIT, I was on the staff of 6.101 for four semesters and also helped teach 6.102, 6.S063, and 6.1040.

In 2023, I started a winter camp in Azerbaijan that teaches C++ and algorithms to high schoolers, with the lectures recorded in a playlist. It ran again in 2024, this time with a group of volunteers helping out.

Community & Service

Open knowledge and community matter a lot to me, and I try to contribute through teaching and sharing.

I organize and host the National Olympiad in Informatics in Azerbaijan, and I created kodlar.az, a crowdsourced blog and wiki where people write about programming and computer science in Azerbaijani. I mentor students regularly and am always happy to talk through questions about education, learning, research, and careers — if that sounds useful, don’t hesitate to reach out.

At MIT, I led OpenCode @ MIT together with Adhami, lived in Burton 5 as floor chair and IM tennis captain, and was VP of Video Gamers Alliance from 2021 to 2023.

Outside of Work

I play a lot of video games and like keeping up with where the industry is headed, get to the theater for new releases often, and try to stay current with the TV worth watching. I also train regularly (weights, plus kickboxing and Muay Thai) and read a fair amount of philosophy, with a particular fondness for epistemology, philosophy of mind, and ethics.

I used to do a lot of competitive programming on various platforms (find me by username toonewbie). I don’t compete anymore, but I still solve problems now and then for fun.

I’m grateful to everyone I’ve worked with and learned from along the way.