Happy new year! Overload and winning a race
Well - happy new year! The last issue was back in August before I went on my charity car drive (more on that below - we won - again!). Since then overload rather took over and life became very busy indeed. I hope you (all) had a calmer life last year.
The topic of overload was one of many we covered in my RebelAI leadership group, I've shared some take-home notes below. In an upcoming issue I'll give a summary on the topics we've been covering in the last year.
Micha Gorelick and I have been working on the 3rd edition of our High Performance Python book for June this year, we've been working on that throughout 2024 - I'll add some notes on the new content in the next newsletter.
I also learned more things about LLMs from the ARC AGI work of last year, I'll summarise that soon too (slides here if you'd like a peek).
If you're in London - the next PyDataLondon meetup is on Tues Jan 7th (next Tuesday). Come meet 150+ fellow data science professionals in a relaxed session.
RebelAI
RebelAI is my private group for excellent data scientists turned leaders, a safe space where we help each other make better leadership decisions. We've been building our supportive community for over a year.
A few weeks before Christmas we ran a session on "Overload" - a recurring subject for maybe 30% of my RebelAI leadership group.
Personally between a full time client (in private equity, building a data science team), working on the 3rd ed of our High Performance Python book, researching for 6 months on the ARC AGI Kaggle LLM competition, having a bunch of house-construction work, working on the charity car for the September drive (below) and having my 4 year old transition from nursery to school - it was a bonkers busy second half of the year. Many other members had related situations.
We discussed how overload happens regardless of industry or academic setting and whether overload and "being visible everywhere" was a necessity for progression. That led to ideas on being visibility successful, without work leaking into personal time.
Emotionally charged interactions were identified as a culprit, along with having to do de-energising work, and we talked through the need to identify and deal with tricky interpersonal issues and ways to identify energising and de-energising work to strike a useful balance.
Member Ryan Varley has some excellent posts on LinkedIn, this one on identifying what creates energy in work is worth a read if you find work draining.
At the end of the session we wrote up the key points (they get stored in our slack for later review), the final take-away was "Don’t chase progression. Life is not all about promotion/advancement". That seemed like a pretty sensible takeaway for us all.
This group is for excellent data scientists turned leaders who benefit from a safe private space to ask questions from a trusted peer group. If that sounds like you, reply to this and I'll tell send you my 2 pager PDF and maybe we can have a chat. The next intake will be during February.
September Charity Car Drive in the Hawaii Five LOW over the Alps (we won - again!)
So in the last issue (August!) we were still working on our charity 26 year old Volkswagen Passat Estate surf car for a charity car drive over the Alps - 11 countries in 7 days. 30+ teams take part in a variety of cars (a beautiful Rolls Royce Silver Spirit turned up), you complete challenges and if you get rather sucked into the challenges you...end up winning!
On top of the charity money raised, we put over £3,000 prize money into the Alzheimer's Society fund raising pot. This affects the family of one of our drivers, as Parkinson's affected the family of another for our drive the previous year (where we raised over £4,000).
Starting in the UK we drove through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia & Czechia and then the Netherlands on the way back. The Stelvio Pass (48 hair-pin turns down) was amazing. Open water swimming in several countries was great. Meeting so many other fine teams was brilliant.
If you want to donate, we're fund raising for just a little longer, all money raised goes to the Alzheimer's Society (and all costs come from our own pocket).
This June we're on a new charity car run to a Spanish beach via the Alps (how else would you get to a Spanish beach?) and Monaco. More on that in a couple of months. If you want to see a photo of me that you'll never unsee, visit the organiser's homepage and scroll down - I was given my costume the day before by my co-drivers. Lovely chaps.