What I learned and accomplished in 2017

This is a slightly self-involved post. The only point is to document for myself what I’ve done in 2017, and force myself to blog a bit more. 

In no particular order:

• I proposed to my long-term partner, and since then I’ve learned a lot about the various decisions one has to make when planning a wedding, it’s really a funky non-linear optimization problem.
• I thought and wrote a lot more about Data Science and the barriers for implementing it in companies, both as part of shipping Data Products at my last_job and also through advisory work for various companies. I blogged some of my thoughts on this
• I helped ship some releases of PyMC3 – and I’d love to spend more time writing OSS code for this, and be more involved, but I’ve just not had the time. This year I wrote some benchmarks, updated docs, and reviewed others pull requests.
• I keynoted at the first ever PyCon Colombia in the beautiful country of Colombia, where I talked about shipping data products.
• I delved deeper into Variational Inference this year, and produced a talk on it at PyData London 2017
• I did an introduction at ODSC London on Bayesian Analysis, this has been based on internal talks I’ve given at Zopa.
• I learned a ton about NLP, and deploying ML models.
• I’ve recently been learning about Fintech and delving deeper in Survival Analysis.
• I’ve been trying harder to implement a rigorous statistical workflow
• I published on two companies (I moved jobs this year) blogs which I’m quite proud of- Elevate and Zopa
• I’ve been delving a lot more into Machine Learning systems, so things like interpret-ability, reliability, monitoring, audit-ability. I think there’s still opportunities for some learning of stuff there.
• I learned a lot more about testing and data pipelines. I learned a lot more about Hypothesis, and Pytest and I’ve added them to my workflow/ taught others about it.
• I’ve developed deeper relationships, and learned a lot more about maintaining the ones you have.
• Joining a gym at work has helped a lot – and don’t mock cardio.
• I made a small commit in Hypothesis – I’m quite proud of this