NYC Data #381: Coding Agents to Decommission Datasets at Spotify, Vicki Boykis on the Craft of ML Today, Vitess at Etsy, Audience at The New York Times, Fertility Journeys, Raphael at the Met
Plus, replacing the subway's electrical systems
Hi friends, happy Friday! It appears we’re looking at a rainy weekend 😕, so it’s a good time to check in on local museums. The Met’s exhibition on Raphael is at the top of my list: please send me other recommendations!
As always, help me keep this space up-to-date: please send me posts, events, and job openings. If you know someone who might enjoy or benefit from this newsletter, please share it with them. [image credit: u/YanksFannn]
Good Local Posts
Vicki Boykis gave a lovely talk (slides & transcript) on building Machine Learning systems, working with AI, and things she’s learned. She moves fluidly between high-level insights and technical detail. She also references an old post that mattered a lot to me, Peter Norvig’s Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. It hits different on the other side of a decade!
Ella Yarmo-Gray of Etsy has a great post on the company’s adoption of Vitess to handle MySQL shards. I loved this line: ‘Five years, approximately 2,500 pull requests and 6,000 queries later, we have successfully migrated Etsy’s shard management to Vitess vindexes!’
Devon Edwards Joseph of Spotify wrote about decommissioning heavily-used datasets with 1,800+ downstream data pipelines using a coding agent and fleet management tools. Very relevant to my interests and work!
Upcoming In-Person Events (new listings in bold)
5/12: Brooklyn Tech Expo
5/13: AI Loves Data New York (formerly Data Science Salon)
5/13: New York dbt Meetup
5/20 - 5/21: Data Intelligence Summit
9/28 - 10/2: MLCon
Open Roles
I’ve posted some of my roles at The New York Times in this space the last few weeks, but I’m not the only person looking for talented analysts here. The Audience team, which supports the newsroom, has a bunch of deputy roles open, including:
If you would like to use your experimentation and analytical skills to help drive the news industry forward, please take a look at the roles. If you apply, let me know: I’ll put in a word with the talent team for you!
Miscellany
The New York Times has a video piece on the NYC subway replacing the electrical subsystems that power the trains, some of which are 90+ years old!
The Pudding had a very touching interactive on a fertility journey, from both the mother’s and child’s perspective.
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