On Nov 7th, I went downtown to an Austin Python Meetup. I got there a few minutes early and was greeted by very nice people. They had free food and beverages, which I considered very thoughtful. I did not know anyone in the room, which typically would be very intimidating for me; however, I was able to join in conversations with others quickly. I met a man named Jacob who was very welcoming, and I believe he is the organizer of the python group.

The first speaker was Nick Schenone who is a pre-sales engineer for a company called Iguazio. He provided an overview of MLrun and all of its offerings. During his talk, he demonstrated the opensource MLOps orchestration framework for MLRun to deploy the model and allows visibility to the user in a larger application.

I found the demonstration very interesting. We went into the python source code and I found myself understanding the gist of the code. This was very exciting for me! To be honest, some of the questions were over my head and I didn’t quite follow well.

The second Speaker was Dima Kniazev software engineer at Redis. His software provides an online feature store for real-time inference. He spoke about the implementation of real-time machine learning. Some companies that use his product use inventory management, gaming, mobile applications, and financial applications.

I worked in Sales for Dell Technologies for many years and this meetup felt like a software vendor presentation for Sales Teams. Usually, at Dell, these software vendors would attend team meetings to present their products to us. At Dell, not only did I sell hardware, I also sold 3rd party software. Building rapport with vendors was critical. Clients may be looking for a solution to their problem in their network, and having the knowledge of all kinds of platforms and understanding how to explain solutions is very important.

Overall, I’m glad I went to this python meeting. It went very well and I understood more than I expected. I learned a lot about Machine Learning and the type of software that can be implemented. I would find great value in attending events such as this in the future. It is a great place to network and meet people in the industry. I can’t see myself becoming a member of this professional community but it did inspire me to become a member of other tech communities.

Thank you for reading.