Ahmad Durra

Embedded Systems Engineer

MIT CS graduate building electromechanical systems end-to-end.

Coursework & Experience

How to Make (Almost) Anything

MIT 6.9020

A hands-on digital fabrication course centered on rapid prototyping across multiple processes. Weekly build assignments included CAD, 3D printing, machining, and embedded programming, emphasizing design iteration, toolchain integration, and learning through physical fabrication.

Microcomputer Project Laboratory

MIT 6.115

A project-driven embedded systems course focused on designing complete engineered systems from scratch. Built microcontroller-based hardware involving low-level programming (assembly and C), peripheral integration, timing, and real-world I/O, with strong emphasis on system-level design, debugging, and validation.

Digital Systems Laboratory

MIT 6.205

A lab- and project-intensive digital hardware course centered on FPGA-based system design. Designed and validated digital systems using Verilog, simulation tools, and the Vivado/Xilinx ecosystem, with large open-ended final projects emphasizing real hardware bring-up, timing, and interface debugging.

Software Performance Engineering

MIT 6.172

A project-based systems course focused on pushing real software toward hardware efficiency ceilings. Implemented and optimized performance-critical code in C, working directly with cache behavior, vectorization, instruction-level optimizations, and algorithmic techniques for high performance.

Software Construction

MIT 6.031

A rigorous course on building large, correct, and maintainable software systems. Focused on abstraction design, invariants, testing, concurrency, and reasoning about correctness in real codebases.

Advanced Algorithms

MIT 6.854

A theory-intensive course exploring advanced algorithmic techniques and complexity bounds. Emphasized formal reasoning, rigorous proofs, and deep analysis of algorithmic tradeoffs.

Computation Structures

MIT 6.004

A hardware–software interface course spanning digital logic, computer architecture, and execution models. Culminated in the design and implementation of a RISC-V processor, requiring reasoning across logic design, datapaths, control, and instruction-level behavior.

Computer Systems Engineering

MIT 6.033

A system-level course examining the design and tradeoffs of large-scale computer systems. Analyzed real failures and architecture decisions involving distributed systems, networking, fault tolerance, and performance.