MLOps Panel

To the Past, And to the Future
All the apply talks are being put online soon for those who missed it. I am teaming up with none other than James Le this weekend to bring one of his super-comprehensive conference reviews. Expect to see that in the Mega-Ops newsletter on Sunday.

Looking forward: I have been talking to Dave from Toronto Machine Learning because they are having the second annual MLOps World conference on June 21-22.

Big News! The winners of the Engineering Labs are going to be presenting at the event. We will also be able to offer discount codes to anyone in the community that wants to go! For now you can check out the call for speakers here and submit a talk yourself. I know you feel like you might have something important to say. Do it!

Part Deux

As many of you know, Demetrios and I are big fans of Luigi Patruno, the founder of MLInProduction.com, Senior Director of Data Science at 2U, and one of the original MLOps communicators and experts. Whenever we have him on, it feels both like a masterclass and a genuine conversation. Because of how great our times with him are, we invited him to be the first guest to do an encore performance for our coffee sessions! I'll share three tidbits we got from him in our latest conversation.

Learning Voraciously: We talk a lot in the community about how to learn and upskill in an efficient way. Luigi provided great insight into how he applies certain principles to his learning practices. One tip he shared is to rigorously read and digest books. Luigi himself has used books to address his knowledge gaps in areas like product, finance, etc. I appreciated the emphasis on books. A lot of the reason we feel inundated by new learning resources is because they are online. Emphasizing books, which are often far higher-quality than blog posts, can slow things down and focus our learning.

Leadership Patience: Lately, Luigi has been spending more time managing projects and the data science team at 2U. He shared a lot of his insights into how to manage data science and machine learning properly. One of the most important things he emphasized to us was his patient attitude towards solving problems important to leadership. Turning around organizations is hard work. It's slow, it takes energy, and it is a nonlinear process. As he has course corrected at various times as a data science leader, Luigi has brought admirable patience to the task, which has helped him be more successful on the things that matter to the entire company.

Communication Flows: It's easy to imagine Luigi as a great communicator, given his experience running MLInProduction.com. In our conversation, he showed us how he puts it to use in his management style. Luigi shared the importance of understanding how communication flows across an organization. Being aware of this is crucial to working on the right, most impactful things. Having a pulse on what different groups and leaders are thinking about can help you evaluate your impact as a team.

Definitely check out this episode with Luigi on YouTube or on Anchor!

Till next time,
Vishnu

Epic Panel

We are now at a level where some seriously experienced practitioners are willing to come on a panel discussion and drop some knowledge bombs on us.

So check this out, we will be talking with Lex Beattie, ML Engagement Lead at Spotify, Mike Moran Principal Engineer at Skyscanner and Michael Munn ML Solutions Engineer at Google.

Expect to see some questions like these:

The Features that we create for ML have wider value in the business, but some MLOps toolchains seem to assume that they exist in a vacuum. How can MLOps tools fit into this wider ecosystem?
How is the current situation with the plethora of tools similar to other areas (e.g. front-end libraries)? How have we coped with this same pattern elsewhere in technology? Similarly, what is this similar to in the past that we can learn from?
As technologists we can easily bias towards reaching for technical solutions to cultural problems. How do we avoid choosing tools which make these same mistakes, and can we actively choose tools which help with our cultural issues?

Looking forward to seeing you all at this one.