Thanks for a great year 🙏

I wanted to take a moment and thank everyone for being part of this community. It has evolved into something I never could have imagined three years ago. Many have heard me tell the origin story, but it is worth repeating the tldr version.

This community was my escape when the world was crumbling due to nationwide lockdown. My world was crumbling due to losing my job when the company I was working for folded. During that mess, I could retreat to a little corner of the internet that was interested in the same thing as me.

I wanted to learn more about using machine learning in the “real world” which led me to start a weekly virtual meetup. I looked to a Brazilian community “Data Hackers” for inspiration on activities we could do to engage the nascent community. Off the back of that, we started this newsletter, the podcast, and the community blog.

In 2022 when things started opening up we jumped at the chance to make this community more than a slack workspace. I would label 2022 the year of the local champion.

We set up the infrastructure for anyone to organize a local chapter and things took off from there. It's always magical for me to go to the local meetups as an attendee. I get to learn and meet others who are just as passionate about this stuff as I am.

If 2022 was the year of the in-person meetups, 2023 brought a plot twist. This was the year of the virtual conferences. We held three virtual conferences with over 150 amazing speakers.

Looking ahead we have so many cool things in the works. My main focus isn’t much different than any other year; create the proper infrastructure to let others shine.

We are continuing what we have been doing (blog, newsletter, virtual conferences, podcasts, and in-person meetups) and we are investing in our learning platform with course contributions from our amazing community! Let me know if you are interested in creating courses with us.

There have been so many contributions from such incredible people in this community over the years. It’s impossible to name every one of you. If you are reading this right now and wondering if I am talking about you, I am.

💡 Job of the week

Senior MLE // Amgen (Remote, US)

Amgen is on a mission to unlock the potential of biology for patients suffering from serious illnesses by discovering, developing, manufacturing, and delivering innovative human therapeutics. The Amgen R&D organization supports this mission by discovering, developing, and delivering transformative medicines that address the leading causes of death and disability.

Requirements:
Experience with Healthcare data, e.g., clinical trial data, electronic medical records or Bioscience’s data, e.g., protein or small molecule data.
Strong software development (preferably, Python) and experience working with libraries and packages related to data manipulation, statistical analysis, visualization, and machine learning algorithms and deep learning framework.
Experience with NLP, image processing, and/or audio processing.
Outstanding analytical and problem-solving skills; ability to learn quickly.
Experience with data modeling; hands-on experience with SQL.

Soham Chatterjee // LLMs to TinyML - Soham leads the machine learning team at Sleek, where he builds tools for automated accounting and back-office management. He highlights the difficulties of scaling machine learning models and cautions against relying exclusively on OpenAI's API.
Spotify | Youtube

Phillip Carter // All the Hard Stuff with LLMs - Phillip is on the product team at Honeycomb where he works on a bunch of different developer tooling things. This one 'slaps' as the young kids say these days.
Spotify | Youtube

Varun Mohan // AI and the Future of SWE - Varun is the CEO of Codeium which assists over 400k daily active users code. But it wasn't always like this. Varun talked about how he pivoted from having an AI infrastructure company to building an end-user app that leverages AI.
Spotify | Youtube