2023 Rewind ⏪¶
As one does when the end of the year is approaching, I took some time to reflect on the past year.
The year started with a big change in my (work) life: I accepted a new data science job at HelloFresh, and relocated to Berlin to start working there. I was very excited about the new challenge, and I was looking forward to working with a new team, in a new environment, and a new country.
Germany is no joke when it comes to bureaucracy, and I had to go through a lot of paperwork to get everything in place, and I am among the privileged ones moving from another EU country.
I am not going to talk about my job at HelloFresh, maybe I even cannot talk about it due to some NDA, but I can say that I am quite happy with the choice I made, the team I found and I am looking forward to the next year challenges.
Mentoring¶
One of the most exciting program, that actually weighted in my choice of joining HelloFresh more than one year ago, is the mentoring program in place in the company.
Every quarter, a new cohort of mentors and mentees is selected and matched with each other on a wide range of topics. The program is well structured but also very flexible, and it is up to the mentor and mentee to decide how to make the most out of it.
Each quarter I joined the program both as a mentor and mentee, and I had the chance to meet and work with some amazing people. In particular during my very first cohort I was lucky enough to be matched with a very experienced mentor - Jamie - who helped me a lot in my personal and professional growth.
I know he doesn't like to get any credit, yet to me he was a key factor in my growth this year; we have been matched on python, but soon transitioned to career development - Jamie showed me actionable ways to get where I want to be and pushed me to start working on concrete steps to get there.
The topics we discussed were very broad, from how to give and receive feebacks, to how to build a personal brand inside and outside the company, to how to build a longterm career path developing technical and non-technical skills.
I am very grateful for the time he spent with me, and how our relationship is still evolving. I am looking forward to keep working with him in the future.
Meetups¶
One of the reason I moved to Berlin in the first place was the amazing tech scene and meetups community. Since I moved here I have been attending a lot of meetups (~1 per week when I am in town), and I had the chance to meet a lot geeks and tech enthusiasts.
I figured out this was a great way to meet new people and make new friends in a large city where I didn't know anyone, as well as keeping up with the latest trends and getting inspired by other people's work.
This envolvment led me to start helping out PyData Berlin, the local chapter of the PyData community, and I am now part of the organizing team.
2024 will be similar in this regard, I will try to attend and organize as many meetups as possible, and the big Pycon & Pydata Berlin conference as well for the first time.
A big conference¶
Talking about PyData and personal branding outside the company, 2023 was the year I gave my first talk at a big conference, namely PyData Amsterdam. I spoke about Bayesian ranking for tennis players, to be honest this was mostly an excuse to get out of my comfort zone and attend the conference, which was a blast.
In hindsight, I really cannot recommend it enough, it was by far one of the best experience I had in 2023 related to my career. I cannot count how many people I met, how many friends and connections I made, how much I learned, and how many ideas I got in two and a half days.
Last but not least I got to meet a lot of people I only knew from social media and online communities, who, without their knowing, shaped my career and my interests in the past years. Having the chance to tell them in person how much I appreciate their work and how much they inspired me was quite an experience.
I am looking forward to attend more conferences in 2024, and to give more talks as well.
Open Source¶
During this year I started to contribute more and more to open source projects. This actually started in 2022, but it was in 2023 that I got more consistent and involved in the community.
I slowly realized that building and maintaining tools that other developers use is something I really enjoy doing and find incredibly rewarding. This is true both for the tools colleagues use at work, and for the tools that the community uses.
On some tools I started to develop and now maintain, the year started with a library called compclasses that I wrote to simplify the implementation of composition over inheritance in python.
Then I needed a way to backtest time series models with folds that are time based instead of index based, so I wrote timebasedcv.
Finally, at HelloFresh a lot of work is based on (custom) iso weeks, and I couldn't find a library that was able to satisfy our needs, therefore I wrote iso-week-date, and I am quite happy with the final result.
In the meanwhile, the contributions I am most proud of are the ones I made to dirty-equals and scikit-lego.
Talking about scikit-lego, in Amsterdam I had the chance to meet Vincent D. Warmerdam and Matthijs Broun, the creators of the library, and I convinced them that I could help them maintaining the library, and so they granted me the maintainer status.
