# Community Ecosystem

**Learn together, build together, grow together.**

TinyTorch is more than a course—it's a growing community of students, educators, and ML engineers learning systems engineering from first principles.

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## Connect Now

### GitHub Discussions (Available Now ✅)

Join conversations with other TinyTorch builders:

**[Visit GitHub Discussions](https://github.com/harvard-edge/TinyTorch/discussions)**

- **Ask questions** about implementations and debugging
- **Share your projects** and milestone achievements
- **Help others** with systems thinking questions
- **Discuss ML systems** engineering and production practices

**Active discussion categories:**
- Module implementations and debugging
- Systems performance optimization
- Career advice for ML engineers
- Show and tell: Your TinyTorch projects

**Why community matters for TinyTorch:** Unlike watching lectures, building ML systems requires debugging, experimentation, and iteration. The community helps you debug faster, learn trade-offs, stay motivated, and build systems intuition through discussion.

### GitHub Repository (Available Now ✅)

Star, fork, and contribute to TinyTorch:

**[Visit GitHub Repository](https://github.com/harvard-edge/TinyTorch)**

- **Report issues** and bugs
- **Contribute fixes** and improvements
- **Improve documentation** and examples
- **Watch releases** for new features

### Share Your Progress (Available Now ✅)

Help others discover TinyTorch:

- **Twitter/X**: Share your learning journey with #TinyTorch
- **LinkedIn**: Post about building ML systems from scratch
- **Reddit**: Share in r/MachineLearning, r/learnmachinelearning
- **Blog**: Write about your implementations and insights

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## Coming Soon

We're building additional community features to enhance your learning experience:

### Discord Server (In Development)

Real-time chat and study groups:
- Live Q&A channels for debugging
- Tier-based study groups
- Office hours with educators
- Project showcase channels

### Community Dashboard (Available Now ✅)

Join the global TinyTorch community and see your progress:

```bash
# Join the community
tito community join

# View your profile
tito community profile

# Update your progress
tito community update

# View community statistics
tito community stats
```

**Features:**
- **Anonymous profiles** - Join with optional information (country, institution, course type)
- **Cohort identification** - See your cohort (Fall 2024, Spring 2025, etc.)
- **Progress tracking** - Automatic milestone and module completion tracking
- **Privacy-first** - All data stored locally in `.tinytorch/` directory
- **Opt-in sharing** - You control what information to share

**Privacy:** All fields are optional. We use anonymous UUIDs (no personal names). Data is stored locally in your project directory. See [Privacy Policy](../docs/PRIVACY_DATA_RETENTION.md) for details.

### Benchmark & Performance Tracking (Available Now ✅)

Validate your setup and track performance improvements:

```bash
# Quick setup validation (after initial setup)
tito benchmark baseline

# Full capstone benchmarks (after Module 20)
tito benchmark capstone

# Submit results to community (optional)
# Prompts automatically after benchmarks complete
```

**Baseline Benchmark:**
- Validates your setup is working correctly
- Quick "Hello World" moment after setup
- Tests: tensor operations, matrix multiply, forward pass
- Generates score (0-100) and saves results locally

**Capstone Benchmark:**
- Full performance evaluation after Module 20
- Tracks: speed, compression, accuracy, efficiency
- Uses Module 19's Benchmark harness for statistical rigor
- Generates comprehensive results for submission

**Submission:** After benchmarks complete, you'll be prompted to submit results (optional). Submissions are saved locally and can be shared with the community.

See [TITO CLI Reference](tito/overview.md) for complete command documentation.

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## For Educators

Teaching TinyTorch in your classroom?

**[See Getting Started - For Instructors](getting-started.html#instructors)** for:
- Complete 30-minute instructor setup
- NBGrader integration and grading workflows
- Assignment generation and distribution
- Student progress tracking and classroom management

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## Recognition & Showcase

Built something impressive with TinyTorch?

**Share it with the community:**
- Post in [GitHub Discussions](https://github.com/harvard-edge/TinyTorch/discussions) under "Show and Tell"
- Tag us on social media with #TinyTorch
- Submit your project for community showcase (coming soon)

**Exceptional projects may be featured:**
- On the TinyTorch website
- In course examples
- As reference implementations

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## Stay Updated

**GitHub Watch**: [Enable notifications](https://github.com/harvard-edge/TinyTorch) for releases and updates

**Follow Development**: Check [GitHub Issues](https://github.com/harvard-edge/TinyTorch/issues) for roadmap and upcoming features

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**Build ML systems. Learn together. Grow the community.**
