🇿🇦 Will you be attending #DataConf in Cape Town on September 17th?
Don't miss the session "Privacy or Piracy in AI?"
Join Pippa Hillebrand, a Senior Backend + DevOps Engineer, who works with https://amazee.ai, in her session.
Pippa will explore:
🔒 Maintaining a secure handle on your data
🖥️ What should, and shouldn't, be logged
💡 Why intuitive, secure AI products are imperative
Attend if you're interested in AI, data governance, security, and privacy.
A workflow I tried out, with reasonable success, was using my shiny new Kindle Scribe to take notes at #dataconf, then used our Llama 3.1 model to clean up the inevitably mangled OCR output, and organise my thoughts into a series of pithy posts.
Results in this thread: https://elk.zone/fosstodon.org/@Gord1i/113044142959559721
The results weren't magic, as I still had to proof read, and adjust to my tone, etc. but definitely got me a good 60% of the way there.
Finally, @gbelrose continued his theme from last year of applying good software engineering to data engineering, and now reporting. This was pretty inspiring, as it's very tempting to throw your hands up when you encounter a mess of dashboards created via elaborate clicky-clicky.
G advocated using platform APIs to extend your data pipelines into this domain, introspecting and annotate dashboards.
Another great talk was from Zintle Faltein-Maqubela on her experiences running data-focused internship and graduate programmes. Was well timed, as we're hopefully going to be taking on more juniors soonish!
The big point I got was around managing expectations on both sides - particularly for interns, they've often got other things going on in their lives. So getting some understanding of that, against what their team needs from them.
Also, really enjoyed Gerhard van Deventer from #EqualExperts on *Lessons Learned from Using an LLM and Expecting Magic*.
Solid coverage of fundamentals that really matched our experience - Improve your prompting; eval early, eval often; break big tasks into small ones -> set up a flywheel, and start eeking out those iterative improvements.
Over and above James's cool use of interactive polls in his keynote, there were many great points about how to be part of the "community". Something that was key was recognising what you take vs what you give back varies over your career.
And of course, he ended up with a rousing rendition of You Must Check Accessibility (YMCA).
Work on the vision system for Miss Duckworth is going "well" 🤣 I waved my hand in front of the camera and it saw things !
Not the right things though, but still I'm claiming it as a success !
amazee.io
Gordon Inggs
Dale Nunns