E202: How the Largest MLOps Community Was Built

Yes, may all those English as a second language teachers out there that are listening realize that if you work hard enough, you can make it all the way to being a member of the non-technical staff at a foundation in the AI space.

So I wanted to get out of the US after I graduated university or college, as we call it in America.

And the easiest way to do that was by teaching English.

And so I jumped on that train.

I was doing that until my daughter was born.

And I had this realization that I need to actually work all year round.

When I was in Spain teaching English as a second language, as soon as summer hit, folks did not want to take English classes.

And of course, like I can relate with that.

I don't want to go and learn a language when it's 40 degrees Celsius outside and the beach is calling my name.

That didn't really jive though when I have mouths to feed and I felt this responsibility of like, I'm the man of the house.

And so then I got into tech because a friend of mine was in tech sales and he said, you might be good at this.

Jumped on that train, was doing tech sales until And around 2020, when COVID hit, right as COVID hit, the company that I was working for was in the ML space.

And it was primarily like an ML platform.

And the CEO said, you know what, it would be great if we like did something around community since nobody is taking our calls now that COVID happened and people are having these existential crisis moments.

So everybody on the team was very excited about it.

And that initiative and project got handed to me.

And then that company went out of business like two weeks later.

And I was stuck with this thing where I was like, you know what? But I kind of like this whole community thing a lot more than I like sales.

And I ran with it.

And so starting in 2020, we just started doing as much as possible around the ML platform space, MLOps as we called it in those days.

And that's why the community was called the MLOps community.

And then fast forward a couple of years and LLMs became a thing.

And so we started talking a lot about those.

And then fast forward even more, agents became a thing.

We started talking about that.