Today we’ll break down the highlights of 2024 - from starting my own business to attending local conferences. We’ll cover new writing projects, interesting conferences and events (both local and online), supportive coding communities, continuous learning opportunities, as well as attainable goals for 2025.

Writing

After writing two posts near the end of 2023, I added eight substantial posts to the roster in 2024, which is pretty solid considering I spent the first 3-4 months of the year working on a project that is yet to be released. Each of these posts, all part of a single data science project, has an associated GitHub repository and took hours to write up. I’m proud of how they turned out!

NCAA basketball statistics project

GitHub

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It’s great to see 562 contributions on my GitHub profile this year! This number only reflects contributions to my public repositories and does not include any commits made to private repos, but it’s still a good indicator of my coding progress this year. I’m especially happy with maintaining this level of visible activity while balancing the rest of my workload and responsibilities.

Conferences

I was fortunate to attend 4 major conferences this year, one of which was in person:

  • Agents in Production Conference, hosted by the MLOps Community, online.
    • Organizer’s Summary
      • “This event focuses on real-world AI agents that are already in or nearing production. From buying agents to customer service and analytics agents, this full-day virtual event brings together the global ML/AI community to share real-world insights into deploying and scaling AI agents in industries like e-commerce, food delivery, SaaS, and more.”
    • Key Sessions
      • The Emerging Agent Landscape
      • State of AI Report 2024
      • Assessing and Verifying Task Utility in LLM-Powered Applications
      • Operationalizing AI Agents in Data Analytics Workflows
  • AI in Production Conference, hosted by the MLOps Community, online.
    • Organizer’s Summary
      • “Large Language Models have taken the world by storm. But what are the real use cases? What are the challenges in productionizing them? In this event, you will hear from practitioners about how they are dealing with things such as cost optimization, latency requirements, trust of output and debugging. You will also get the opportunity to join workshops that will teach you how to set up your use cases and skip over all the headaches.”
    • Key Sessions
      • Building the Next Generation of Reliable AI
      • Productionizing Health Insurance Appeal Generation
      • Evaluating LLMs for Production
      • Data Labelling Best Practices
      • Opportunities and Challenges of Self-Hosting LLMs
  • Data Engineering for AI/ML, hosted by the MLOps Community, online.
    • Organizer’s Summary
      • “This is a conference at the intersection of Data and AI.”
    • Key Sessions
      • Building Hyper-Personalized LLM Applications with Rich Contextual Data
      • How Feature Stores Work: Enabling Data Scientists to Write Petabyte-Scale Data Pipelines for AI/ML
      • Data Scientists & Data Engineers: How the Best Teams Work
  • Women in Technology Conference, hosted by RVATech, in Richmond, VA.
    • Organizer’s Summary
      • “Central Virginia’s premier technology conference: RVATech Women in Technology is a technical conference for all technologists and business professionals. Aimed at bringing together professionals on a wide range of relevant topics to learn, engage, and collaborate, this event will feature a robust panel of keynote speakers, fascinating breakout sessions, and ample opportunities for networking.”
    • Key Sessions
      • Diagnosing Hallucinations in your LLMs
      • Data Science at Scale to Drive Compelling Retail Experiences
      • Bridging Technology and the Gig Economy
      • Deep Tech Panel
      • Principles for Building Scalable Data Products Using Modern Tech Stack
  • Note: In the past, I have also attended RVATech’s Data + AI Summit in Richmond, VA. However, I was in Arizona on the day of the 2024 conference, so I was not able to attend.

Events

This post would be far too long if I included every single event I attended, so here are a few highlights:

Continuous Learning

I focused on expanding my knowledge in machine learning and data science through a combination of books, online resources, and practical applications. Here are some highlights:

Communities

I actively participated in several online tech communities, engaging in discussions, sharing knowledge, and learning from other professionals in the field. Here are the top three communities:

Challenges

I joined a public coding challenge for the first time. This one was hosted by the Women Coding Community during the month of December and was primarily managed through their Slack community. My individual progress was tracked through a GitHub repo. The coding challenge was surprisingly fun and I would definitely participate in another one in the future!

Looking Forward

My recap of 2024 wouldn’t feel complete without a few rough goals for 2025:

  • Publish six articles
  • Attend two conferences (at least one in-person, if possible)
  • Join an event hosted by the PyRVA group
  • Read three books
  • Join a coding challenge

That wraps up my recap of 2024! I’m grateful for the opportunities to learn, grow, and connect with others in the tech community. While I always with there were more time, I’m happy with the progress made this year and am excited for the year ahead. Happy New Year!