Slow living - review of 2024

As 2024 draws to an end, I’m taking some time to think about what’s happened so far. This year feels fast and slow at the same time; it feels the most relaxed I’ve ever been. Simultaneously, I’ve still accomplished a lot, even if it didn’t feel like that?!

Slow living??

As of Q4, all I do is work, eat and spend time with family, do things around the home, spend time on my hobbies and with my partner. On weekends and some weeknights I will meet up with my friends and just hang out. I read somewhere that time-boxed “catch-ups” don’t create as much memories as when we were kids and just “play” aimlessly, so I’m trying to go back to college life when we did that a lot.

I’ve also been sitting back and enjoying my book launch - in 2023 I spent the year writing Machine Learning Interivews. It came out digitally end of 2023, but hit the shelves as physical copies in 2024.

Conference chairing

This year I tried something new: conference chairing. I sourced speakers and hosted/MC’ed the following conferences:

• O’Reilly AI Superstream: Building with Open Source Generative AI Models and Frameworks
• O’Reilly AI Superstream: Multimodal Generative AI
• QCon San Francisco

Pros: I get to build out my network, as well as learn from industry experts. I’ve gotten to know a lot of the speakers better professionally. This helps me directly as I’ve been working with GenAI and RAG at my work.

Cons: It’s challenging to cold-DM people and not get a response. I found that warm intros were the best. The conferences all have a separate logistics team, so I’m not stuck doing calendar juggling, which was great; I could focus on my strength - my network in the ML/AI community.

Conference speaking

I was the ML Keynote at Data Day Texas 2024. I had such a great time there that I immediately said yes when invited back for Data Day Texas 2025.

I was also invited to keynote at another conference, which I will announce when they do. So in total, I did 2 keynotes this year, and chaired/hosted for 3 conferences.

I also did a few talks at other conferences and Meetups, including Toronto Machine Learning Summit and the Meetup that I organize, Toronto Women’s Data Group. At this rate I’m getting lazy to update my own speaking page (but I should), as there are just too many!

Work

I don’t share too much about the actual details of work on my personal blog, but I’ve led some exciting work leveraging Generative AI and RAG. Apart from internal demos, I had the chance to speak publicly on some of that work at an Elastic Meetup and Elastic webinar, but the rest will be to come.

• Elastic Meetup - Distilling the meaning of language with vector embeddings in Elasticsearch: link
• Elasticsearch AI Workshop with Microsoft: Craft Generative AI Applications: link
• IWD webinar (Elastic x Microsoft): link

Travel

It’s nice to look at where I’ve been, as usual I go to the states a lot for work and personal reasons, and my goal to at least have one non-North America trip has been fulfilled thanks to our company all hands.

• Austin, Texas, USA
• Prague, Czechia
• Cottage trip with university friends in Canada
• Boston, MA, USA
• San Francisco, CA, USA

I’ve also hosted a few friends from the states in Toronto.

Next year so far I have planned - Austin again, Las Vegas, probably a trip back to Taiwan and dropping by Japan and HK.

Personal

When it comes to goals that people start to think about at some point: relationships, finance, career, and so on:

I think I’m pretty happy with all of those; I spend a lot of time with family, friends, partner. I’m travelling. I’ve crossed a few major financial goals this year. I go see my family doctor. I’m thriving in my career.

Life is good.