Alhamdulillah. I’ve completed the 30 Days of Quantum Computing challenge. It was an amazing learning experience. Let’s highlight what I did these past 30 Days and what I’m planning to do next.

# Lessons learned

I started off by completing the three free pathways on Black Opal. That was a great introductory resource, full of interactive visualizations and exercises, which helped in understanding complex topics. I then moved on to reading the Introduction to Classical and Quantum Computing by Thomas Wong. This was also an introductory resource for Quantum Computing but it delved much deeper as compared to Black Opal. Thomas Wong made the PDF freely available for anyone, significantly reducing the entry-barrier for upcoming quantum scientists. This is a great initiative and much much appreciated. As far as the book goes, it’s an exceptional introductory resource to the field of Quantum Computing, as evident by the high praises from almost all who read the book. This took me a considerable amount of time to complete because I was taking notes along the way (writing latex formula is such a bore). I shared my notes to the general public as well, implementing an automated publishing workflow using Obsidian, Zola, GitHub Actions, and Netlify. You can access the notes here.

After completing the book, I started the 2021 Qiskit Global Summer School to learn more about Quantum Machine Learning. I’ve watched the first couple of lectures only as of yet, but I’m planning to complete it in the near future. I also started reading the Machine Learning with Quantum Computers by Maria Schuld and started taking the Coursera Specialization: Quantum Computing: from Basics to the Cutting Edge. Furthermore, I was planning to participate in the QHack 2022 challenge, so I also started preparing for it, by learning about PennyLane from the Xanadu Quantum Codebook. On the last day of the challenge, the QHack2022 event started, so I listened to the talks by reputable Quantum Researchers and worked on the QHack Coding Challenge as well.

That’s the gist of what I did these past 30 Days. I’m ecstatic for completing this challenge, for being consistent, for learning and growing immensely, being a part of Twitter community, and helping others wherever I can. Now, let’s talk about what I’m planning to do next.

# Moving forward

Now, I’m planning to commit to a new challenge, the #100DaysOfQC challenge. This is very similar to the 30 Days Challenge as I will be learning about Quantum Computing, for 100 consecutive days, but there are some changes as well.

First, I’m planning to create content (blogposts, videos, tutorials) on Quantum Computing, trying to explain in simple terms what I learn. I noticed that during the #30DaysOfQC challenge, I didn’t dedicate enough time to this because I felt pressured to do something that I could then post on Twitter. As we know, content creation is hard-work, especially the videos (which I really want to do), and I didn’t want to post that the progress for today is that I worked on animating a $5$ sec clip to visualize a topic/idea. Even though I wrote notes and shared them publicly, that’s completely different from writing tutorials and publishing videos, which are very time-and-energy consuming tasks. Previously, I committed to learning about Quantum Computing for 30 consecutive days. This time, I’m committing myself to 100 days of Quantum Computing, be it learning, teaching, or anything else. I should just dedicate enough time to Quantum Computing each day. It’s up to me entirely if I want to read a book, write a tutorial, code a Julia implementation of some quantum algorithm, work on a visualization/simulation, or record/edit/animate a YouTube video related to Quantum Computing. This will give me more flexibility to carry on with this challenge and be more productive.

Second, I won’t be posting daily updates on the blog. I’ll only give updates on Twitter so be sure to follow me there if you want. I’ll only post on this blog when I want to explain a concept or write a tutorial.

I also want to encourage you to participate in this challenge with me. It’ll be fun, I promise 🙂 We can create a study group, learn together, support each other, and collaborate. If you are interested, do let me know, and we’ll figure something out.