What I learned from NormConf 2022

Summary of selected talks and lessons learned

NormConf is an online tech conference about things that matter in data and ML but don’t get the spotlight. As something that started as a Twitter joke, NormConf 2022 exceeded anyone’s expectations. It encompassed many excellent presentations from smart people sharing stories from real-life experiences in the field. All talks, available as a YouTube playlist, are worth watching. This post summarizes core messages that will likely apply to anyone, regardless of your role and title.

An ML Fairytale — keynote by Vicki Boykis

In the conference keynote, Vicki shares a fairytale about an ML engineer called Vectorella. Vectorella symbolizes a deeply curious person, eager to learn and work hard to solve interesting problems. She discovers, however, that the work she is asked to do often doesn’t reflect the cool ML she imagined. Instead, she must work on often tedious and repetitive tasks involving pulling data, cleaning it, scheduling jobs, and dealing with YAML and distributed clusters.

She then discovers the private staff-mle Slack channel. She imagined that people there must be doing fascinating and important work. To get there, her manager asks her to perform three more tasks to prove she’s worthy of that…