Author’s note: As I write this, I noticed how the previous post had the most views by far in this series. Thank you for your support! Feel free to get in touch here if there’s particular areas you’re curious about, I would love to hear from you!
I had been exploring different generative AI topics and now finding myself wanting to be a bit more focused. I need to have a goal, but what could it be? The last time I got this excited about a technology was probably 10 years ago, when I made the move from Berlin to San Francisco to take a closer look at data science and machine learning.
Now what goal did I have then? I started with Stanford’s Statistical Learning online course (with R!), learned Python via Codecademy and Peter Norvig’s Design of Computer Programs online course, and started attending meetups. In particular, remember attending a Python meetup where one of the contributors to scikit learn shared new features from the most recent version release.
That might have been my first Python meetup, but I wondered to myself, what are the existing features of scikit learn? If it’s a question I’m asking for myself, surely there are others who are asking the same question too.
I put together a presentation that helps you go from 0-to-1 with pandas and scikit-learn. I set up the Kaggle Berlin meetup and presented it there twice. I applied to present at PyCon UK 2014 and got accepted! It was a blast! Plus saying “I’m here to present at a technology conference” was the fastest immigration experience I had entering the UK.
What do I have in mind this time around? It’ll be some variation of getting the audience 0-to-1 with generative AI, more details to come.
I love reading about paradigm shifts, and learning to program was my entry to the previous one. The theme in the mid-2010s is there’s so much data, the ones who are skilled at extracting insight from data will be better to ride the waves of change. IMHO the theme now is we have this new ‘alien technology' that we’re still figuring out how to use it.
That technology is generative AI.
If you’re curious about the title, I translated ‘fake it till you make it’ to German, then back to English under different translation styles and picked my favorite one. I know, right? Amazing!