Reflection on 2021

Posted on Fri 28 January 2022 in posts

Background

The year 2021 has ended, and I thought that it is a good opportunity to reflect on the past year and the journey that I had taken. Since this time of year his also co-insides with my Birthday - so it is a double opportunity for such reflection.

Personal

Transitions are always challenging, but putting yourself in an uncomfortable spot is the way to move forward. During the past years my daily workday job was fascinating and complex, but I felt that I needed to move on. As a consultant in a large governmental organization, you are exposed to many fascinating issues that are relevant to the wide public, but you are limited in the decision making process (as an outsider). Additionally, as in any enterprise organization, it was challenging to push forward various project due the politics and mindset of many of the managers, although many of my direct managers were on board and gave all the support that they could give.

Career

The career journey in the 21st century is far from mundane. I was lucky to get onto the Data science/ Machine Learning train ride after the start up that I was involved with folded. Even more so, I was lucky to meet old and new colleagues in the real world and in the Internet, who where patience in listening to my challenges and gracefully accepting my contribution to various Open Source projects.
This is a great place to plugin a wroth while interview with Chris Albon by the MLOps Community, who elaborates on the OS culture in Wikipedia organization, and their philosophy on the place of Data Scientists in an organization (hint - reduce friction to enable a full cycle DS). In the government body that I was working at, due to various restrictions, our DS and IT infrastructure were separated from the organization IT infrastructure, thus giving us freedom to move fast and break things. The cost is an overhead in infrastructure maintenance, which sometimes can alter the focus from the core business goals that we tried to deliver. However, being close to the business expert domains, allowed us to engage in high value projects.

Summary

Wrapping up, I would like to share the podcasts that were part of my journey. Since I'm a podcast buff - I'll only share the technical podcast, although many other supportive ideas followed me along the years.

I am grateful for all the people that I have met and cherish the moments where we managed to bent the dent in on going work of the organization.