MLOps Learners Discord: 2022 in review

I’ve always wanted to be part of a community, and in 2022, it was wonderful to see that happen.

Why we exist: member-first, vendor-neutral community

I had the idea for this community when I left my job in 2021. I missed having a community, where I can learn from, bounce off ideas, and just to be among people who share my interests.

But the server didn’t really get going until we had our first committee, which originally consisted of Ammar Asmro , JinYun Soo , Han-chung Lee , Chloe He , Aditya Soni , Goku Mohandas . Soon, Eugene Yan and Kyle Kranen joined us, and we got a ton of help from other members.

We discussed and decided that we would NOT have any corporate sponsor. We want the community to be vendor-neutral so that we can focus on what’s good for our members instead of what’s good for our sponsors.

While it’s a lofty goal, it does make things hard. Every ML/data community we know has people working full-time on them. Everyone who contributes to our community does so because they want to. They volunteer their time and knowledge.

I’m very proud of what we’ve been able to achieve as a grassroots community.

Events

We noticed early on that it’s hard to have a sense of a community without events to bring people together. In 2022, we hosted 10 virtual events, and 3 in-person hangouts (Seattle, San Francisco, and Toronto).

Each virtual event got between 100 - 400 sign ups, 50 - 200 people attending live on both Zoom and YouTube, and an average of 1,300 views for each recording.

Some of the community’s favorite events are:

• ML System Design Jam: Session Based Recommender System: A doc that I find super impressive, and reflects the work our community can do is the brainstorming doc we had while preparing for the session-based recsys jam session.
• Machine Learning in Cybersecurity: Lessons from the Field
• Resume critique session

We didn’t think about collecting feedback for each event, but we realized that we got around 30 feedback for the events we hosted through Meetup.

What people like about our events: how many said so

• Learning something new: 21
• Seeing new possibilities: 6
• Feeling welcome: 6
• Experiencing growth: 5

Growth

In 2022, our member base grew 3x from 4,000 members to 12,000 members! We’re also on:

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@mlopslearners?
• LinkedIn: https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/81954236?
• Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/ml-meetups-virtual/?

It still amazes me whenever someone asks a question and I see someone responding with detailed, helpful answers/ Somebody asks a short question and we have a 30-response thread helping them out!

The channel #career-advice was created from member requests, because people specially seek advice, and people want to share what they’ve experienced.

Whenever there’s something interesting happening, I can count on the channel #discussions for thoughtful and new perspectives.

In the uncertainty of today’s market, you make me feel not alone.

What’s next for 2023

We have a lot of ideas for 2023. We have a big community with people caring deeply about making ML production easier, and we want to provide space / support to help our community members tackle hardest challenges in MLOps.

• More events, both virtual and in-person. Perhaps we can do a weekly virtual hangout/watercooler chat session?
• More opportunities for members to meet and work together. Perhaps even collaboration with open source developers?
• Highlight challenges around ML production and discuss solutions / build tools to address them.
• More discussions on techniques, tools, and career opportunities.

We’d love to hear your feedback on our community, and what you want to see in 2023. I’d really appreciate it a lot if you could spend 3 minutes filing out this form: https://forms.gle/1DLR3sfh4NmgjVJ49?

We need help making things happen. If you want to get more involved: e.g. join the committee, host an event, speak about a topic -- please let us know in the form too.