As a high school student, he scored zero points in a national programming competition a few years ago. This was not a reason for him to give up programming. Today, a student of undergraduate studies at the Faculty of Science and Mathematics of the University of Montenegro (PMF UCG), Jovan Vuković from Podgorica has four successful hackathons behind him, and at the last one, organized by the OpenAI company, in which over 7.000 competitors participated, his team was third.
To say the least, he is in love with programming. And you can feel it from every word he says. He likes to study and says that it never occurs to him to leave his studies because of a good business offer. Because there will be time for work. In the meantime, he is not resting and, in addition to the application with which his team recently came third, he is announcing a boom for the summer!
"I have solved a problem that has existed for generations, all I will tell you is that you will no longer need to use a flash drive. I finished it, took the test... But I don't have time now, there are exams. I like to explore. I like to work on something that people will use, that has application...", he says in an interview with "Vijesti".
The only one from Montenegro among more than 7.000 competitors
The reason for the conversation is the latest success of a PMF student - the third prize at the OpenAI hackathon, a programming competition organized by an international company for research and implementation of artificial intelligence. In the competition, which was held from February 24 to March 3, 7.319 competitors (programmers, designers and innovators) created creative solutions for a certain problem, or challenge.
Vuković was the only competitor from Montenegro and the leader of the team that developed the project with the working name Miraa_. It is an application that offers a range of digital services - logo creation, social media ads... which can be used for branding, digital marketing, web development and video production. For the development of the solution, as he explained, it was preferable for the authors to use the tools of the OpenAI company. This company is known to the general public for the ChatGPT platform.
"That's why I signed up, I like competition, I like when there are a lot of competitors, where there is no age limit. Doctors of science who teach at universities around the world were also present at this... Success depends on what your idea is conceptually, the presentation of that idea, the technologies you used," he says.
For the Miraa_ application, they used, among others, technologies for artificial intelligence such as Midjourney, Whisper, Dalle, Codex, DeepFake...
Vuković says that before this competition he had no experience with artificial intelligence, nor, he says, does he know how it works.
"I didn't even need it, it's only important that I know how to use their tools, that I know how to connect and create a functional application that can help people," he said.
He also says that one of the reasons he signed up for the competition was that he was interested in learning and applying that technology as well.
He adds that to participate in similar competitions, it is not the most important thing that you are a "top programmer".
"But it is preferable if you think you can achieve a good result, because the most modern technologies are used... It is a huge plus if you have experience," he said.
The application that his team was developing looks like a simple tool where the end user gets the product in a few clicks.
"That's the goal," explains Jovan.
The Miraa_ application actually generates content such as photos, text, video... Vuković explains that it is possible, in addition to text, to enter a voice message that gives the application tasks, and the application, again with the help of AI tools, translates it.
"We made it so 'user friendly' (easy to use), that you can get everything in two clicks. The goal was to get the digital package needed for the company quickly and easily," adds Vuković.
The application, he says, is basically intended for startups, people who start companies, who then need a logo, advertisement, video advertisement, website...
"We make everything through that digital package, and with that you save quite a bit, because how many days would you spend on editors, designers... while you explain to them what you want. This is ideal to start with, to push you into the market. But it doesn't have to be a startup, you can use it for anything, if you're selling comic books, for example..." says Vuković.
He also adds that the Miraa_ application analyzes the user's requests, based on which the data is further analyzed and the needs are understood even better.
By the summer, he says, the package for creating films will be completed.
"No one is preventing you from doing that and it's great for professors, for people who have lectures and the like. It opens up a much wider range of things we can do," he says.
At competitions, you learn about others and yourself
Jovan competed in programming for the first time last year, when the student organization EESTEC LC Podgorica organized Infinite Loop. Ten teams from all three Montenegrin universities participated in that event, and the challenge was to create a streaming application. Jovan competed alone and was second.
"It was one of my first major successes and it really motivated me, I liked the concept of the competition, because in a short time you can learn a lot of new things. Afterwards, I said to myself why not try something bigger, because I'm someone who works hard, I like to learn, I'm interested in new things", he says.
This was followed by the OpenAI Whisper Hackathon, Jovan's first global hackathon, in which around 1.700 competitors participated. His team was third at the time.
"I was in shock, because 1.700 people is not small. After that I signed up for this OpenAI hackathon, was a team leader. I'm glad that I already had experience, I learned from my mistakes, I knew what I did wrong, what I needed to correct, and this time we really messed up", he says.
Prizes are not absent at competitions, but they, says Jovan, should not be a motive for participation.
"The goal is to learn something new, meet a large number of people, with whom you can start a company tomorrow. At competitions, you communicate, exchange ideas, sometimes you are surprised by other people's way of thinking. A person should have a broader picture of how other people think, I see it as an opportunity to expand one's horizons and work on oneself," he says.
He tells young people in particular that it is important to gain experience and to love what they do.
"I follow logic - I'm young, what do I have to lose? I could have won nothing, not entered the top three, there were over 2.000 teams, no one guaranteed that success. I went out and I absolutely didn't care, and I made a nice team with whom I still work," says Jovan.
Failure is no reason to give up
He says he is not a top programmer.
"I know a lot, but here - in high school, I won zero points at the national programming competition. And I prepared a lot. It made me so depressed, I wanted to give up programming completely. It all depends on what kind of approach you have. If you fail at something and give up, it's on you," he says.
He also says that in application development, a great idea is not always a guarantee of success, but that the market decides on that.
"You have high-end applications that may be the most optimal, but if people don't like it, it's for nothing," he says.
Programming opens many doors
In an interview with "Vijesti", Jovan repeatedly emphasized how much he likes to learn and how much he is in love with programming. He also says that he is happy because he enrolled in PMF, even though, as a student of the high school of electrical engineering, he was thinking of enrolling in electrical engineering.
"PMF has the strongest programming, we have courses and subjects that cover all areas. The professors, the staff in general, are people from whom you can learn a lot", he says and says that the faculties in Montenegro are no worse than those in the world.
He also adds that young people after high school may not be sufficiently informed, but for those who want to go to PMF, he says that they will not make a mistake no matter what direction they choose. And with programming, he says, there are many possibilities:
"The entire IT sector opens up to you, you can be a programmer in a bank, work in a private or state company, work as a senior developer if you prove you have enough experience. You can create websites, desktop applications, maintain servers... You can do absolutely everything, that's the good side of programming, because you're not limited if you don't know one thing, that you can't do something else, it's just a matter of whether you like programming. If you don't like studying at this kind of university, it's better to think about what you want to do, four years of life is not a small thing. Better dedicate yourself to something that really interests you", says the interlocutor of "Vijesti".
There is no expert without knowledge
Although they offered him the job, he refuses for now, because he says - the university, and everything else.
"I believe that the faculty is mandatory for further education, you cannot call yourself an expert if you are not equipped with knowledge. I learn programming from books, I also buy and download foreign literature from the Internet. There are people who are engaged in programming and have only completed the course, the course can cover part of it, but they cannot explain in detail how something works", says Jovan and adds that it is not good to do something all your life, and you don't know how some things work.
An algorithm can be good even when it doesn't work
Commenting on the fact that as a high school student he won zero points in the national programming competition, and today he wins awards as a programmer, Jovan says that this is because the school only evaluates whether the algorithm works, and not the idea behind it.
"It was a slightly different kind of competition, it's not applied... You have some logical task and you try to solve it. The biggest problem is because they didn't judge whether it was right, but literally, whether it worked or not. That's too bad, whether the algorithm works is much more important if you have a good approach. "Someone doesn't manage to finish in four hours, maybe a mistake slips by... that's bad," says Jovan.
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