Hello world 👋

Roughly one year ago I attended one of the most interesting and fun (online) conference you could ever attend: the one and only NormConf, organized by Vicki Boykis.

The speakers list was just out of this world, I don't think you can organize a better conference than that on what it does matter on the day to day in the data science ecosystem.

If you are curious, all the talks are available on YouTube.

But what does this have to do with this blog? Why am I writing about a conference I attended more than a year ago?

The motivation behind this blog

One of the talk that resonated with me the most was the one by Chris Albon, titled Don't Do Invisible Work. In this talk, Chris explains why it matters to keep track of your work, and how to do it in work environments that don't have a formal system in place for it.

A TL;DR of the talk would come from two slides:

The problem

The problem is that performance reviews, promotions, bonuses, and other evaluations are based on the work they remember. And if they don't remember, you can be evaluated as if you never did it.

And people suck at remembering.

The solution

1. Build our own lightweight system for tracking our work.
2. Tell our people about that work.

This is great advice that everyone should follow at work (I am sad to admit I didn't put much effort into that), but I believe it can be applied to other aspects of our life as well. The benefits are not only through the people judging us, but also directly due to the fact that we are forced to reflect on what we have done and explain it to others (or to our future self) with as much clarity as possible.

One year later

I was considering starting a blog, or at least a TIL (Today I Learned) section, for a while now.

Not that I think I have something particularly interesting to say, but I do believe that writing down what I learn is a great way to consolidate the knowledge and to have a reference point for the future, at least for my future self.

Additionally I realized that I hold some (very?) opinionated view on a variety of topics, which I would like to discuss/be confronted about. Yet I never really started to write anything down.

The main excuses are that I was in the process of changing jobs, moving from Milan to Berlin, setting everything up, and so on. After that I started to dedicate large part of my free time to side open source projects. But the truth is that I was just lazy.

So, one year later, I am finally starting to write down my thoughts and what I learn. I am not sure how often I will be able to write, but I will try to do it whenever I feel like I have something worth sharing, which, as mentioned above, may end up being anything I would like to remember in the future.

How to set up a blog

I am not going to write a tutorial on how to set up a blog, mostly because I have no idea.

The only thing I can say is that mkdocs-material blog plugin makes it increadibly easy to set up a blog using mkdocs and integrating with GitHub Pages. Every article is just a markdown file, written in the same way as any other mkdocs page (which is great, because I am already using mkdocs for my open source projects), and the blog plugin takes care of the rest.

mkdocs-material is an amazing theme, and I am very happy with it for its simplicity and customizability.