Leadership advice from PyDataLondon 2024
Leadership advice from PyDataLondon 2024
Further below are 6 jobs including:
- Data Scientist (FTC - 12 Months)
- Senior Data Scientist
- Principal Data Scientist - MOPAC
- Data Engineer at Airtime Rewards, Permanent, Manchester
- Analytics Engineer at Yoto, Permanent, London
- Software engineers at the Bennett Institute of Applied Data Science
We've just run out 10th anniversary PyDataLondon conference (write-ups 1, 2, 3, 4). As usual it was excellent - great talks, 500+ attendees and lots of new stuff to learn and discuss.
I ran my usual Leadership discussion. The goal for the leadership discussions is to dig into opportunities and challenges for team leaders and to get advice from the crowd on how they've solved similar issues, so members can get closer to repeatable success. This format evolved into my RebelAI private leadership group (noted below), I've been running these sessions for 7 or so years at PyData conferences now - people tell me that they meet very interesting people in these sessions.
I've written up the first chunk of leadership discussion below.
At the conference I gave a lightning talk on the LLM hacking game called Gandalf, getting the audience to hack prompts along with me, using Hungarian and French and other approaches to step past the password-guarding-guardrails. Fun! Thanks also to James for putting the excellent Pub Quiz (a conference favourite) together and for having Emlyn and I on stage, super fun!
Training
I have new dates to announce for my upcoming training in July and September. The links on my training page show the July and September dates - if you fill in my training notification form I'll happily send you a 10% discount code valid for this year. In a few months I'll be running:
- Software Engineering for Data Scientists July 8-10 - increase your speed of delivery by modularising, running code reviews, testing for increased confidence and preparing for production from early on
- Fast Pandas July 18-19 - make your existing Pandas codebase 2-30x faster per bottleneck by addressing common issues with powerful speed-ups
- Successful Data Science Projects September 26-27 - decrease failures and make success more likely with better project planning and execution
If you'd like your Pandas code to run faster, your team to write more maintainable DS code and your projects to succeed more frequently - check out the above and fill in my training survey.
Data Science Leadership at PyDataLondon 2024 (part 1 of 2)
Last weekend we had our annual PyDataLondon 2024 conference, at the session I run my usual Leadership session. We have circa 50 people in the room at each conference (conference attendance circa 500), talking on the topics that have been proposed.
Ian Ozsvald always does a great job running the leader's session (see his write-up in the comments). I came away with a bunch of new contacts and some useful highlights. Have you noticed how your own mood and stress can impact your team - maybe you need a holiday? Legacy code is “code that makes money”, and shouldn't be thought of so negatively. And Laszlo Sragner on understanding motivation with self-determination theory “for an individual to be continuously motivated in their role, three factors need to be present: autonomy, mastery and relatedness.” - via Ryan
We start with me explaining how the session runs (Chatham House rules, you introduce yourself if you're responding), we take a list of possible questions, vote on them, then work through them most-voted-first:
The questions evolve each year, they tend to show what's gnawing at a fair selection of the leaders in the room this year. In the hour we got through leadership vs demotivation, specialisation vs collaboration and enabling change in a resistant organisation.
I've listed the question below, I'll cover the others in the next newsletter.
Leadership vs demotivation
What do you do if a team member is given a project and they accept it, but they don't want it?
- Poor motivation might mean they're on a "low energy, low skill" project given their interests
- Maybe the project can be paired with a second more-fun project?
- Ryan wrote this up and expanded it on LI (and you should go read it!)
- Some might think "legacy is boring" but "legacy is the stuff that makes money" - help the person see why their project is valuable in the org and how this could help them
- Maybe they've not realised that with visibility you win "political points" and get improved promotion prospects?
- Working collaboratively could be more fun than solo projects, so check if people on solo projects are happy?
- Ask your demotivated team member "how can we make this more interesting for you?"
- Self determination theory talks on autonomy, mastery and purpose - perhaps they've hit a point of frustration that needs to be identified?
- Laszlo expands on this in his You Only Need These 3 Data Roles in a Data-Driven Enterprise
- Alienation theory was briefly noted to explain why folk might not feel empowered and engaged
- Successful teams should never burn out, so what's blocking success for this person?
- A lack of motivation might mean they don't understand the value of the project?
- Founder grumpiness can infect the team - sometimes the wider team need to do an intervention to send you on holiday so after you can lead with confidence
You can see the full write-up on my blog, I'll cover the other two points in the next issue.
If you face topics like this, maybe you need to join my RebelAI private leadership group for "excellent data scientists turned leaders"? Reply to this and I can send you a 3 pager PDF which explains what we've done so far.
Setting up a PyDataLondon meetup
We had our usual organisers dinner at PyDataLondon for meetup organisers. Several people in the room wanted to setup new meetups (for Swansea, Cornwall and Nice) and I pointed them at my older post on thoughts on establishing a PyData meetup from 2019. It still looks pretty sensible! If you're building a community and figure that the person who helped build a 14k member community might have figured a little bit of it out, maybe take a look at that older blog post.
Recent package updates from PyPI:
This is a random sample from a set of popular projects, that have been updated very recently.
- modin 0.27.1 Modin: Make your pandas code run faster by changing one line of code.
- coverage 7.5.3 Code coverage measurement for Python
- bandit 1.7.9 Security oriented static analyser for python code.
- numba 0.60.0 compiling Python code using LLVM
- ruff 0.4.9 An extremely fast Python linter and code formatter, written in Rust.
- xgboost 2.1.0rc1 XGBoost Python Package
- scikit-optimize 0.10.2 Sequential model-based optimization toolbox.
- spacy 3.7.5 Industrial-strength Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python
- scikit-learn 1.5.0 A set of python modules for machine learning and data mining
- lightgbm 4.4.0 LightGBM Python Package
Footnotes
See recent issues of this newsletter for a dive back in time. Subscribe via the NotANumber site.
About Ian Ozsvald - author of High Performance Python (2nd edition), trainer for Higher Performance Python, Successful Data Science Projects and Software Engineering for Data Scientists, team coach and strategic advisor. I'm also on twitter, LinkedIn and GitHub.
Now some jobs…
Jobs are provided by readers, if you’re growing your team then reply to this and we can add a relevant job here. This list has 1,700+ subscribers. Your first job listing is free and it'll go to all 1,700 subscribers 3 times over 6 weeks, subsequent posts are charged.
Data Scientist (FTC - 12 Months)
We’re setting up a Data Science team at MOPAC. We’ll be building the capabilities as we go: establishing analytical best practice; setting up the infrastructure; and demonstrating data science potential. You’ll be unlocking knowledge into what causes the overall trends of crime in London and compiling the code to derive meaning from survey and consultation data…and a huge number of other things!
This post is ideally suited to someone who is keen to break into the world of data science, with excellent statistical, technical, and interpersonal skills. If you're passionate about using data for the benefit of all Londoners, apply today!
- Rate: £39,604.00 - £45,411.00 per annum
- Location: Remote (One day a month in Union Street, London)
- Contact: anthony.duguay@mopac.london.gov.uk (please mention this list when you get in touch)
- Side reading: link
Senior Data Scientist
We’re setting up a Data Science team at MOPAC. We’ll be building the capabilities as we go: establishing analytical best practice; setting up the infrastructure; and demonstrating data science potential. You’ll be unlocking knowledge into what causes the overall trends of crime in London and compiling the code to derive meaning from survey and consultation data…and a huge number of other things!
This post is ideally suited to someone with data science experience who wants to be hands on in a data role, is a curious flexible thinker, with excellent statistical, technical, and interpersonal skills. If you're passionate about using data for the benefit of all Londoners, apply today!
- Rate: £46,597.00 - £53,209.00 per annum
- Location: Remote (One day a month in Union Street, London)
- Contact: anthony.duguay@mopac.london.gov.uk (please mention this list when you get in touch)
- Side reading: link
Principal Data Scientist - MOPAC
We’re setting up a Data Science team at MOPAC. We’ll be building the capabilities as we go: establishing analytical best practice; setting up the infrastructure; and demonstrating data science potential. You’ll be unlocking knowledge into what causes the overall trends of crime in London and compiling the code to derive meaning from survey and consultation data…and a huge number of other things!
The Principal Data Scientist role is ideally suited to someone with management experience, with excellent data science knowledge to lead the way on our journey into data science. If you're passionate about using data for the benefit of all Londoners, apply today!
- Rate: £55,009.00 - £62,860.00 per annum
- Location: Remote (One day a month in Union Street, London)
- Contact: anthony.duguay@mopac.london.gov.uk (please mention this list when you get in touch)
- Side reading: link
Data Engineer at Airtime Rewards, Permanent, Manchester
Design and implement robust, scalable data pipelines to ingest data from internal platforms into our data warehouse. Monitor and maintain data pipelines, ensuring data quality, integrity, and availability. Optimise data pipelines to enhance performance and reduce cloud computing costs. Understand, gather, and document detailed business requirements. Take ownership of data projects from planning to delivery, collaborating with other departments as needed. Innovate and automate current processes, driving continuous improvement.
- Rate: £35,000 - 45,000
- Location: Manchester, Hybrid (2 days/week in office)
- Contact: oguzcan.koncagul@airtimerewards.com (please mention this list when you get in touch)
- Side reading: link
Analytics Engineer at Yoto, Permanent, London
We’re looking for an Analytics Engineer to join our team to accelerate the business and help us make sense of the terabytes of data we receive every day.
We’re a small team at the heart of all the decisions Yoto makes. We work in a mature, high-trust environment with a lot of independence. Everyone can contribute ideas and be part of the decision making process. We tackle a broad range of problems, from developing cutting-edge data products to building and maintaining our data orchestration platform. Our work spans across all the key strategic projects throughout the company.
- Rate: £30,000 - £40,000 based on experience.
- Location: Kings Cross, London (Hybrid)
- Contact: jeena.lakshmanan@yotoplay.com (please mention this list when you get in touch)
- Side reading: link
Software engineers at the Bennett Institute of Applied Data Science
We're looking for software developers, at all stages of their careers, to help build, maintain, and operate OpenSAFELY -- a revolutionary open source platform for secure clinical research. We're also looking for a team lead, a project manager, and a research software advocate (think "developer evangelist" for research).
Led by Ben Goldacre (clinician, researcher, and author of Bad Science and Bad Pharma), we’re a truly interdisciplinary team with a strong track record of delivering useful tools in a globally leading research setting. You’ll have the chance to use your software skills to save lives and further the state of medical data research. Our software delivery teams are collaborative, supportive, thoughtful and kind, and we support hybrid or fully remote working, with in person team events throughout the year.