2024 sabbatical

• I had been working in various data science and software engineering roles for many years
• The whole time, I’d been looking for a path that fully utilized both skillsets
• In early 2023, it started to click for me how building production-scale deep learning models could bring it all together
  • At the time, I was working on platform projects:
    • Vector retrieval
    • Model lifecycle management
  • I also saw the incredible self-education potential of ChatGPT
• So I started to plan a sabbatical to catch up on the deep learning literature
• I started about a year later
  • Started with Vaswani, et al. (2017)
    • Worked backwards until I had the needed foundation (Cho, Bahdanau, etc)
    • Worked forwards from there (Devlin, Radford)
  • Also took the opportunity to go into some depth on topics in distributed systems