New beginnings. And the future of this Newsletter.

It’s been a while since my last newsletter update. Always a shame to start a post that way… In case you don’t remember who I am, I’m Santiago. You might have subscribed to this because:

• You once bought my now-obsolete game, Data Science Trivia. (DM me if you want free access to the cards as a PDF.)

• You found me on LinkedIn or Twitter and subscribed because you are a nice person.

• You know me from The Little Book of ML Metrics.

• You joined the AI from Scratch study group.

• You know NannyML and somehow ended up here.

• You know me in real life and wanted to spy. If that’s the case, I’m sorry.

Whatever the case, I appreciate you being here.

It’s been six months since my last update, and some things have changed. Not many, but some.

• AI from Scratch: We ran two successful study group cohorts, where we readSebastian Raschka, PhD's newest book, and Chip Huyen's AI Engineering book. We’re starting the third cohort next Sunday, July 13th. We’ll be reading The LLM Engineer’s Handbook. More details here.

• NannyML joined Soda Data Quality: All of my former colleagues and I joined Soda’s team to work together on a single mission: managing the world’s automated decisions.

• The Little Book of ML Metrics: With NannyML’s acquisition, the book got delayed, and we weren’t able to meet our original goal of publishing in Q1 or Q2 of this year. The good news? It’s still happening. 🩵 I now expect to have a complete version ready by the end of 2025. I truly appreciate everyone who pre-ordered, your support means a lot to me, and I value your trust and investment.

• Apparently, I have a new blog format?: After two work trips to New York, I started writing what I’m unofficially calling New York Thoughts:

  • Obsession

  • Intention

  • Validation

  • Fundamentals

  • Direction

  • Take it Personally

For some reason, many on the Soda team love them. Hakim even printed them and put them up in the NYC office so everybody could read them.

This newsletter is called “Santiago and the ML Models”, and I guess I’ve always struggled to know which of the things I do and write actually fit in here.

After some thought, I’ve decided to bring my full self. Not just the ML/AI part. So you can expect:

• Technical posts related to AI/ML and Data Engineering

• Updates on projects like AI from Scratch and The Little Book of ML Metrics

• New projects I’m working on

• Less technical posts like the NY Thoughts series

Anyway, that’s the state of the union.
Now, back to building and writing.

Let me know what you're working on, or just hit reply and say hi.

See you in the next one,
Santiago