You Can Not Measure What You Do Not Care To Manage When I started my first data scientist job in 2015, the team I joined had a recommendation system that would run every night to compute new recommendations for all users of our platform. This was the easiest way to handle the cold start problem. At the next company I worked at, we had a rule that every machine learning model must be setup to automatically retrain (“autoretrain”) on fresh data on a periodic basis.| www.ethanrosenthal.com
Features stores are now becoming a thing. Google Cloud is supporting Feast, an open source feature store, AWS announced the SageMaker Feature Store in December 2020, and tecton.ai raised a $35 Million Series B in the same month. While it’s going to be a while, I think that feature stores will do to machine learning what data warehouses did to analytics. Just as any department can now calculate metrics and setup dashboards thanks to a centralized data warehouse empowering “self-service ana...| www.ethanrosenthal.com
There is no shortage of stories about tech founders achieving face-melting wealth from startup success. Bless their hearts. On the other side are stories with unhappy endings of founders sacrificing everything for the sake of their startup. I hate those stories. This story lies smack-dab in the middle. There is zero money made and minimal money lost. This is a story of how I had an idea that I was excited about, pursued it for 6 months, and then decided to pull the plug and get a job.| www.ethanrosenthal.com
About 15 months ago, I left my full-time job as a machine learning team lead with the goal of doing independent / freelance data science consulting. Since then, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about what that means and entails. I have not found too much information about this type of work, other than Greg Reda’s fantastic post. I hope this blog post answers some of those questions for anybody interested in becoming or hiring a data science consultant.| www.ethanrosenthal.com
Having built machine learning products at two different companies with very different engineering cultures, I’ve made all of the following wrong assumptions All other data orgs do things like my company, so we’re doing fine. My org is way behind other orgs. My org is uniquely advanced, so we can rest on our laurels. In order to escape the small bubble of my existence, I posted a survey in May 2019 to a private slack group and on Twitter.| www.ethanrosenthal.com
Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."| meta.wikimedia.org
Our cool new house needs one more plank in its foundation.| benn.substack.com