First off, apologies for the late newsletter—the new year brought with it some overhead. However, we’re back with our first update of 2022!
🎁Wrap-up of our investment announcement
We announced our investment end of 2021 and got incredible feedback! It really went viral and outperformed everything we announced before. We got more than 100k views on LinkedIn and thousands of views of the ZenML GitHub repository. If you had told us a year ago that the pope of NLP, Chris Manning, will post about us we definitely would have not believed you. He is just one of many incredible investors. We’re thrilled to kick off 2022 and fully focus on the usage and growth of ZenML in production.
Fun fact: On his podcast, Lex Fridman is telling Elon Musk how our investor Jim Keller “educated” him on manufacturing cost. → jump to the section here
🌎 Building Real World Examples
One of the biggest challenges we want to address moving into the new year is a lack of production use-cases online for ‘real-world’ usages of ZenML. This has been delayed because we’ve been working our butts off building the foundation of the tool, and sometimes it’s hard to build valuable content when the team is so focused on internal efforts.
As a start, Hamza will be a guest in Demetrios’ MLOps Community meetup on Jan 26 at 6 pm CET. We will be using ZenML to build a real-world example live (fingers crossed). The goal of this interactive session is to show how easy it is to use ZenML from scratch until deployment. Given the easy-going nature of Demetrios and Hamza, I’m really looking forward to an entertaining meetup. Mark it on your calendars and don’t miss it!
We are still trying to implement ZenHack’s (an internal hackathon where we implement stuff using ZenML) periodically. We want to do more of these, but have run into trouble in actually implementing ML repositories with ZenML. We’ll keep you posted on those!
💰Don’t forget the Business!
Even though we’re open-source, we will need to figure out how to sustain ZenML on a financial level in the long run. For that, we teamed up with smart MBA students from the pan-European Business School ESCP. During 12 weeks we’re analyzing the MLOps market in-depth and developing strategies on how to enter the market. Part of the research is the following survey, in which we’re trying to understand where and how ZenML is currently used and what industry vertical is the best to focus on first. We’re also giving away 25€ Amazon vouchers to two lucky participants until tomorrow 😏
→ To the “ZenML x ESCP” survey
💗ZenFamily keeps on growing
We’re still growing the core team! We have three new joiners as Machine Learning engineers. Stefan will “automate himself out of existence” and James describes himself as half-sloth, half-man (We took Bill Gates's advice to hire lazy people, as they are more efficient than everyone else). Finally, Jayesh joins as our first working student hire all the way from Bhubaneswar India, and will help us write more ZenHacks!
This week the MLOps Community newsletter is also telling the story of why and how Alex joined ZenML - read it here.
We’re still looking for a DevRel Rockstar! The DevRelWeekly newsletter will include this psition in the next 5 publictions. But as always: If you know someone, please let us know!
✏️ Play the long-term game with content
When building open-source, it is imperative to keep pushing out content week after week. In ZenML, we have a “content sprint”, alongside our “engineering sprints”, where we plan out our content, assign tickets, and distribute it on the internet regularly.
For example, Alex recently wrote a new blog post and he’s taking you by the hand. If you’re more the type of guy with a hands-on approach rather than reading the documentation first this will be something for you!
📺 Pipeline Conversations - now available on YouTube!
As part of the above-mentioned content planning, we also launched our own youtube channel. Currently, we mainly use it for our podcast but will extend it by tutorials, meetups, or conference talks.
Speaking of the podcast, we have two new episodes! We spoke with Danny Leybzon, currently working with WhyLabs to help data scientists monitor their models in production and prevent model performance from degrading. He previously worked as a kind of roving data scientist and engineer, helping companies put their models into production.
We also spoke with Ines Montani, co-creator of spaCy. This has proven to be our most successful podcast yet, in terms of downloads. Perhaps this is because Ines herself has a phenomenal personal following, and it seems the tools she and her teams work on spark joy in their users. We tried to learn from her to apply it to our own daily work here at ZenML.
And that’s a wrap. If you enjoy our bi-weekly musings on building an open-source startup, don’t forget to spread the word by forwarding this newsletter to your friends! Onwards and upwards to 2022.
—Adam