Community Hangout Announcement [Sep 18, 9 AM PT]

Announcements
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Date: Sept 18
Time: 9 AM PT, 9:30 PM IST
:round_pushpin: Links to signup, click here

Note: The event is agenda is below, the event marks our community launch party but really we wanted to hangout with the incredible fastbook, PyTorch study groups and socialise with our community!

Agenda:

  • 5-10 min, Opening & A few words about wandb community
  • 30-40 min of breakout rooms
    We’ll create breakout rooms for fastai/PyTorch, and similar topics, the goal is to meet our fellow members and put faces to the logos we’ve been seeing on twitter, the forums and slack for a long time
  • 5-10 min: Wrap up and announcement of winners from sprints, top contributors

Hey Everybody!

We’re super excited to host our first community hangout! We’ve been learning and growing our ML skills together and it’s been such a fulfilling journey for us to see you join our study groups and not just study but also share so many incredible projects!

This post also marks two major events: Our Forum Launch and our first community hangout event:

We wanted to use this opportunity to both celebrate our community and invite everyone to share their journeys with us! To celebrate this, we’ll also be picking the most interesting journeys shared on the introductions thread and sending some swag their way!

If you haven’t done so, please consider telling us more about your ML Journey here, please do tell us about any projects that you’ve been working on too!

We also want to start hosting community led projects. To encourage the same, we’ll be running THREE sprints starting today, where we’ll be curating resources to “Top Down” Python, PyTorch Best Practises, Transformers Wiki

Please find all details there and help us create these learning resources.

To make our first ML Sprint fun, we’ll also be awarding the top contributors during the Zoom calls.

We’re super excited about this and look forward to seeing you at our party next weekend!

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Announcing winners from Introductions:

I wanted to highlight community members that had interesting background-folks that had picked up ML as a challenge and decided to transition into the field.
Wonderful people, that come from varied backgrounds and yet achieve great heights in the field are always a huge inspiration to me and everyone.

With that in mind, Winners:
@kevinb: I’ve known Kevin personally for a long time via the fastai forums. ML is quite new as a field, and it’s really great to see what Kevin along w Hiromi has achieved in the field. They’ve recently started their own venture! This makes me so happy. Good Luck, Team!

@imaging_scientist: Thonia, has transitioned from an academic background into Data Science. We learned @amanarora’s fastai sessions made their way to helping a govt project that Thonia is working on! It’s always :scream: to realize how close & global our community is!

@theadammurphy: Adam took the challenge and leap of faith in ML-he quit his job recently, transitioned into freelance, and established himself as a strong freelancer :muscle: In just a span of 2 years, Adam has grown so much in the field! I should ask for his notes. This is incredible, Adam!

Finally, @jessicamarycooper -I was hoping to find at least one person coming from a different background, different referring to a field unrelated to coding. Jessica’s story blew me away:

Before that, I was an oil painter, taught kickboxing, ran a design firm, and renovated houses in Portugal - so it’s been a long and winding road!

Jessica, it feels like any direction that you select, you gain immense success in it. We can’t wait to see what you achieve in ML!

Sprint Winners:

@harveenchadha & @aadil both added some great links to the wikis! Thanks for taking the time!

Congrats to everyone tagged above! We’d love to send W&B swag your way-I’ll reach out via DM! Also, as a sign of gratitude for being a part of the community, I’d be happy to give you mod/higher “trust” level access on the forums. Please let me know if you’d be interested in that :slight_smile:

We’re honored to be a part of your journey! Thanks to all of you for joining our forums! :tea:

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Thank you Sanyam, I have actually been thinking recently about how much tooling had been built since I started my journey 5 years ago. It has been so much fun watching the community grow into what it is today and I am just lucky to have found such a welcoming place. I am so excited to see what the next 5 years look like!

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Hi @bhutanisanyam1 feeling honored and happy I got chosen! Thank you! I tried to DM you but couldn’t figure out how… would love to have some swag and please also increase my trust level too :slight_smile:

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