DEV Community: Emily

My First Year in an AI Startup

Emily — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 18:23:14 +0000

Last week I celebrated my first year at Zilliz 🎉, the startup behind the open source vector database Milvus, in the heart of the AI boom. Somehow, the year has been both the shortest and longest year of my 17 years in the software industry. It seems like a prudent time to stop, catch my breath, and reflect on what I’ve learned.

Everyone is Learning 📚

One of my favorite things about the AI space right now is that it seems like everyone is learning which makes it feel safe to be new or honest that you don’t know everything. I’ve been in environments where the expectation is that everyone should already be an expert on established tech 🙄, which is ridiculous. AI is evolving so fast that there is so much to know, learn, and understand and everyone is working through it at their own pace. So if you’re still watching from the AI sidelines thinking it’s too late for you, I’m here to say the water’s fine, jump on in.

No More Us vs Them 🤝

I’ve been preaching this for a while but it’s past time to eliminate the technical vs. non-technical paradigm. Like vectors, technical skills are complex and multidimensional. The tech industry tends to stamp people as “technical” or “non-technical” based solely on the department they work in. This year has been refreshing to educate seasoned developers on the mechanics of vector databases and retrieval augmented generation. Everyone is non-technical or technical on a particular topic, and thankfully it’s not a fixed state. Wherever you are on that journey doesn’t define what you can contribute.

The Only Constant is Change

I can’t tell you how many times I would log on, see the latest AI announcement, and feel like I woke up in a whole new industry, only to do it all over again the next day. Sometimes it felt impossible to keep up, but eventually, we all learned to flow with the shifting currents. When I started with Zilliz it felt like very few people I talked to even knew what a vector database was (click here if you don’t), but now it feels like every database under the sun is now claiming they are one. An AI gold rush where everyone has headed out west to stake their claim. If change makes you uncomfortable, I suggest learning to accept and flow with it because it’s not settling down any time soon.

Don’t Panic at this Disco

AI will and is changing the way we work and interact with the world around us in a major way. But it won’t change everything overnight. It takes time to integrate new habits and invent new ways of doing things. I have increased exposure to AI tech from working within the industry and even I forget and do things the slow way sometimes. I’m excited about new use cases that are emerging (hello reverse image search in e-commerce) and technologies that will solve current challenges in new ways we haven’t even thought of yet. My recommendation is to take a deep breath and approach the scary AI soundbites in the media with a healthy dose of skepticism and instead focus on how it might make your life or your job a little bit easier. Hate making a grocery list every week like I do? Make the “robots” do it while learning more about what’s really going on in the world of AI.

Open Source Advent

Emily — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 17:41:51 +0000

Zilliz is kicking off an OSS Advent to close out 2023 and we've invited 24 cool AI & ML open source projects to join us! If you're looking to up your skills and have some fun this might be the challenge for you. This event is free and open to all.

Here's how it works:

Every day unlocks a new open source project
Participants earn points by starring repos, building projects, sharing what they've learned.
Points get submitted at the end of the contest before January 2nd and winners will receive and exclusive swag pack from Zilliz and the participating partners.

Learn more:

Contest Details & Advent Calendar: https://zilliz.com/open-source-advent
Contest Discord: https://discord.gg/R5ezcZ3Xm8

Participating Projects

Milvus by Zilliz
FiftyOne by Voxel51
Quivr by Stan Girard
Haystack by Deepset
Proton by Timeplus
Ydata-synthetic and Ydata-profiling by YData
Flink by Apache
LangChain RB by Andrei Bondarev
Flyte by Union AI
DVC by Iterative
Phoenix by Arize AI
TruLens by TruEra
OpenLLM by BentoML
LabelStudio by HumanSignal
LlamaIndex by LlamaIndex AI
LLMWare by Ai Bloks
Determined AI by Determined Team
Paimon by Apache
VectorFlow by dgarnitz
Pachyderm by Pachyderm
GPTCache by Zilliz
Ray by Ray.io
Temporian by tryolabs

Announcing InfluxDB University - Free education for real-time data developers

Emily — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:36:51 +0000

At InfluxData, it’s no surprise that we are passionate about time series data. Our team is committed to helping our community understand its capabilities and sharing easier and more efficient ways of working with InfluxDB, Telegraf and Flux. Our end goal is always to deliver faster Time to Awesome™ for our users. To this end, we’re excited to announce the launch of InfluxDB University.

InfluxDB University brings together our weekly live trainings and workshops and a new catalog of free self-paced trainings to help our users get up and running faster, learn best practices and build better data-driven applications. This initiative provides us with the opportunity to focus on the skills developers need to be successful using the InfluxDB platform through hands-on and scalable trainings. With courses ranging from beginner topics to advanced configurations, InfluxDB University is for all time series developers regardless of whether they are conquering enterprise challenges or figuring out how to monitor their home weather station.

What to expect

Today, InfluxDB University is open and free to all. You will find introductory content to key elements of the platform, including InfluxDB, Telegraf, Kapacitor and Flux language training. We even offer a workshop course that covers how to build an IoT application with InfluxDB. These courses are on-demand, so you can work through them at your own pace — anytime, anywhere.

We’ve also launched a new section of our community discussion forums dedicated to InfluxDB U as well as some sections specific to our most popular courses where learners can connect and interact with instructors.

As skills around InfluxDB continue to grow in demand from the companies that rely on the platform to power their technologies, we wanted InfluxDB U learners to have the ability to show off their skills and achievements. Through a partnership with Credly, InfluxData is offering digital credentials for all learners who successfully complete our 100-level and above courses. Learners who earn these digital badges can share them on their social networks or add them to their resumes.

What’s coming

We know that an initiative like this wasn’t going to cover everything on launch day, but we wanted to make sure everyone had access as soon as possible. We’re committed to continually adding new courses, iterating and updating the content of current courses to include new products and features, and offering new learning pathways and goals for students.

We look forward to your feedback along the way. Like all things open source, your input is helpful and appreciated. So, thanks in advance for helping us make InfluxDB U the learning experience that developers want and deserve.

Enroll for free today

Getting started with InfluxDB U is simple and free. Just sign up at www.influxdbu.com.

We are excited to welcome you to InfluxDB University!