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In our latest episode of the newy tech people podcast I interview james weakley, data architect at nib health funds.

James has just returned from the U.S where he was speaking at a conference over there. Interesting to hear James perspective on the future of technology and his rise into the data ranks.

Hope you enjoy the episode!

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Show Notes

Here you can source all the things we have talked about in the podcast whether that be books, events, meet-up groups and what’s new in the newcastle tech scene.

Online Courses:

• data camp

Podcasts:

• Hard core history- dan carlin
• Publish, Perish or Podcast

• LinkedIn- James Weakley

Find all local Newcastle Technology Events

• • Event’s Page

  Transcription:

  Welcome to NewyTechPeople today we’ve got James weekly data architect it and I bet welcome James thanks for me another and I be stalwart yeah how many of you have come in I being a few of you we might have a good chunk of probably in proportion to the Newcastle Tech’s it is it’s a relatively big guy tech team arrow debate and doing some pretty cool technology so and so yeah I think picked people from different different parts as and tech teams some different stories yeah it’s easier from that perspective rather than sort of double sniffing in the same area but at least you know everyone sort of comes with a different angle yeah my daughter architect how did you get to a job title like that well stuff in the beginning okay I’ll ask wanna way back had to get an attack I’m into tech world I was I was into computers when I was in high school yeah I actually grew up in gonna you gonna yeah yeah I’ve seen a my mom’s family grew up in vulgar bright okay yeah Anna da generally everyone knows someone from guys yeah I’ve been I’ve been now that many at times surround Christians time which was too hot for my liking yeah so that’s where I grew up being into IT when I finish school I kind of got a job better local mighty place and it’s kind of like a arty kind of business consulting slash systems integrator yeah for pretty small kind of rural businesses or agriculture businesses doctor surgeries and law firms and stuff this was 2002 so pretty early days as far as you know it was pre I think before broadband or ADSL was even in town so what’s the running around in cars and doing kind of a bit of everything yeah when you you’re very your room it’s very broad so it could be anything from my printers broken into doing a server refresh or yeah even some application development back then it was kind of dotnet was brand new so there’s a bit of that going on kind of whatever customer needed yeah it’s rolling our bat stomping ground right yeah and where multiple has gained a bit of it you know a bit of an insight into sort of everything yeah and being very small there’s only four of us there so kind of thrown in the deep end as far as within a couple of weeks you know you’ve given a card you’ve got to go out and see a customer there’s a 19 year old geek I have to very quickly get comfortable talking with you know business owners and so on but where I got where I sort of got into that role was some I was into the Linux high school and business owner wanted to try and he wanted to sort of make a bet on Linux and use it in a business environment so he kind of got me into rather than just install windows everywhere would doing some similar stuff as well and did that for a couple of years it was whilst doing I also joined the Army Reserve Intimus around that was a bit of a weird story going to that I think it was a few of my mates at the time what got home from work and they said hey we’re gonna go join the reserves do you want to come I said yeah sure it was just a small off there yeah it was a bit it was a bit kind of in the moment but I also figured it would be job look I could take with me I knew I was gonna move at some point yeah to study and work elsewhere so I figured that’d be a good job that I could have waiting for me if I moved to Sydney or Amida you know and yeah although most of the guys that we’re going to join didn’t end up getting through there process various reasons so I think it was just me and one of my mates we ended up in there driving a PCS personnel carriers for a couple of years and then I decided to move well I applied for a few different university positions got one at Newcastle hadn’t really been here before that so yeah moved here when I was I guess 20 did computer science at Newcastle yeah then just kind of stayed on analyzed did work part-time in my final year for another systems integrator called diamond they’re still around yeah the kind of again pretty broad systems integration work for them initially and then when I graduated I went and spent a couple of years as a developer for next-gen dotnet which actually on your previous guess it was Jeremy yeah work for them as well so they’re they’re a Sydney company but a grand new cars for office yeah so that was kind of a couple of years you know on the keyboard not really much more focused sort of roll and better be staffs are not much customer action just kind of implementing features and fixing bugs yeah but that was really where I learned a lot of kind of software delivery practices you know automated testing and version control and all those things that kind of foundational yeah this is where our first one all that was kind of that graduate roller I took and then actually you went back to Diamond for a few years after that that business had changed quite a bit since when I left they were they’d shifted into managed services so there was a lot of sort of centralized monitoring and remediation so I did did that for a few more years you know kind of figuring out how we could detect problems or anticipate problems on people’s systems proactively and try and fix them yeah it’s a very different to the kind of break fix world that I’d come from and then it was 2014 I started having meetups locally like people started organizing these things that I’ve never sort of heard of before and I started going to one of them was in Foucault’s and who actually started that that was I think it was Matt Finch he started it yeah yeah now even maybe someone else yeah maybe white probably yeah started going to that and met all of my be people and started talking them about what they were doing and it sounded really interesting so I kind of ended up going over there and the first job I had in IB was QA engineer which is kind of like a test focused developer yeah manage the team there for a period and then the last couple of years of really Connors ship took ease a bit into the data analytic space yeah as part of the migration to the cloud ni be you know there’s a there’s a data warehouse and all these component to that so I’ve been pretty busy helping them kind of rebuild their whole stack move the data warehouse to the cloud do all the reporting analytics of cloud services which is there’s quite a lot to cover there that’s that’s where we are near in us ah one thing like I’m saying like Donna your dad and daughter on there right yeah obviously there’s a lot of companies done unfortunately the ones starting is doing there no I’m just starting so did that on the water I understand it you know where Donna can actually powerful in their business looking at what does that actually look like sudden cleanse that up I we said is there a reason or K reason why you went down that daughter out of spout of Deena is an interest or yeah there’s always an interest but it’s when I was at university did a machine learning course yeah and I was really interested in that kind of had a big impact on me actually just the way I thought about what what software could do you know up until that point I’d sort of a program computers my whole life very explicitly you know if this happens do that now very logical and that was the first time I’d seen an actual learning algorithm that you could say here’s how you can you know learn a trend or a pattern and have it go away I don’t like to personify too much but you know essentially arrives at the answer through through that approach so that was quite quite interesting and but when I studied that it was kind of pre the big data hype so you know it was in the middle of a an AI winter so now I was really talking about it now on many companies were yeah we’re doing what many I call IO and it wasn’t really until the cloud took off that people started getting really excited about it so and then probably add a few more years to that before Newcastle companies who were seriously you know had the quantity of data and the use case to sort of look into it and I think in IBS kind of an obvious place to do that in Newcastle just because we hope the scale yeah yeah there’s lots of there’s lots of situations where it’s worth the time and effort spent doing it to get that result okay I have somebody once said at bay into a role like your senior data architect right looking around yeah obviously large flood sorts of data I’m starting to actually get some real insights in that what may if you had to say what system key some key sort of paths to that you make sure you did some training in around machine learning I was a course in uni is there any I guess early job titles that should be seeking yeah it’s it’s changed a bit I think in the last few years and data science is now I kind of considered its own of course I did it as one subjects kind of buried between software development courses but I think data science now they’ll teach a lot more of the math the statistics courses that you need to really make robust kind of analysis yeah it’s it’s very easy to particularly when you’re dealing we’re pretty good modeling to misunderstand what the data is telling me so I think it’s important to not just learn to code and then cross over straightaway I think it’s important to do a little bit of basic kind of statistics but I think if you do any of the kind of online data science courses or through a university then they’ll probably tend to give you a healthy mix of that and I think the other thing that’s important is that you kind of pick up on the job is that domain knowledge you really have to understand what what the businesses aren’t you know behind it yeah you can’t just look straight at the data and not consider you know the real world behind it and you know it’s one thing to make a prediction that’s accurate it’s another thing to be able to make a change that can do something with that and so I yeah and often that I think that’s where my current role is is important it in IB is some you have to know how it’s going to connect back to that day to day process yeah yeah that point down for data’s sake right like how does this actually affect the business and you say is there something we can do on the back of this other there’s some actionable insights that we can do to change business to help the business yeah that data yeah I think is um definitely I get that the further out you down there in the tech world the the more importance there is about that on greater understanding of business and tech what are we doing from a technology perspective how does that actually affect the business you ever say as I said there’s pregnant funny I’m really interesting datasets or predictive analysis that you can do in large datasets but you know what’s the point of this yeah what are we doing that for yeah exactly what’s that impact gonna be yeah often you can get good results on you know kind of in the lab on a data set but the change required to modify the production system or this behind it might be really expensive yeah so that could blow out the cost equation if you don’t beware of that upfront I think a lot of the a lot of material that’s out there is starting to flag that you know make sure you know the total size of the project don’t just go in on the data science piece thinking that once you solve that everything or everything what’s happening yeah great hey you made many mention machine lounges for obviously I was gonna play a reasonably large part in the future of your topper I’ll what’s your opinion on on both of those technologies it’s funny is it’s technology that’s been around a long time but the impact of it has just changed a lot so machine learning that we use today the techniques haven’t changed all that much in the last few decades but the processing power and the size of the data sets have so that’s definitely I think everyone would say that these days a lot more knowledge workers can have their roles automated than previously so I think that’s kind of a general trend that where previously manual labor was getting automated now through Industrial Revolution nothing we’ll see that a lot of decisioning can be maybe not completely automated but augmented quite heavily by decision systems you use machine learning behind I think there’s a lot of ethical questions I think they have to be answered in next few years in different industries about just because you can do something you know what’s the impact of it how a lot of these algorithms can have a lot of inherent bias in them that might make a different decision to what a human would because the factor in less to the equation you know what yeah so I think I think that a lot of people imagine these completely automated processes where no human touches it whereas in reality I think it’s kind of like a lots a bit like machinery you know driving a tractor there’s always somebody that’s has supervising role and then they have they kind of have this extended power that they use these systems for yeah yeah oh great cause listen to podcast the other day with the Bob and he was talking about you know the future future of AI and then taking more of those mellotron census has he said I think machines have taken a lot of more that process-driven miles and but you know knowledge driven Rossum will continue to be automated and differentiated or be creative it you know it’s like optimized for creativity it’s that creative departments really will be next to impossible you don’t ask for for computers to to understand so it’s that creative thinking that the human can bring to and he was looking at it from a really you know positive perspective that the crap work will get you know continue to be automated or the process driven start from the creativity or always be valuable there it’s like how how can your creative brain use this technology to solve a problem not to serve a purpose sir I think you’re on the money that yeah I think there’s always a role for yeah I don’t think people will be automating the creative process in your new future are people can have fun with some Genevieve I I you know creating a song or an I work with an automated process I’ve got a motor behind it but I don’t know that that’s that’s I don’t think people are paying lots of money for that type of art and I think it’s more bit of fun yeah great yeah nice happy you’ve just returned the US yes a couple of weeks ago oh you are oh you over there for I was there for there’s a tech company over there called snowflake they’re clay out Todd away house yeah they’re on the about them yet product on the market for that fog ease but they’re going through a pretty massive growth then and IB was a pretty early adopter of that platform in Australia so we were kind of their first big financial services customer and we did a proof of concept with them earlier in the year for this feature of the product called data sharing which basically means instead of sending files out to apartments you can just directly query people start off who you’ve allowed to so we were doing a proof of concept on what that could do in our industry and how we could use it for transparency of cost information in yeah so on so yeah I got invited to do a talk theater on that proof of concept yeah just to kind of share what we built a vendors love to have customers come and talk at their events and so that’s that’s how I kind of cut into that nice position what social proof right for them as a vendor and you know to say hey his company is actually using it how they’re using all sort of successes you having yeah yeah that’s right but it was a good conference there were heaps of those other healthcare companies there but lots of just their general customers from the US and other parts of the world got to meet a lot of people and go a few events while I was there so you know it’s a good good true and ass was that your first major speaking a bit I guess it’s probably the first one of a conference of that profile yeah yeah how’d you find that I’m not I’m not a huge fan of speaking I don’t mind doing it it’s not something I naturally love yeah but I’ve done it enough that I’m comfortable doing it so I don’t think I was too worried about actually getting up in front of people I didn’t I really know too much about the venue logistics luckily how many people were gonna be there I think that was about 50 or 60 it was you know sort of a breakout room yeah so yeah it was fine it was some had some good questions afterwards you know I didn’t make any terrible mistakes or anything I got some good feedback so you know that’s pretty okay the Q&A parts most exciting or I like or it’s yeah it’s a nice engaging which is great yeah I think I prefer Q&A prepared speaking yeah as it’s a little bit you can’t really overthink it because you don’t know what’s gonna be asked yeah I know using the confident because of token value actually knowledge they react yeah that’s right yeah yeah from speaking perspective you mentioned you not you’re okay with it right um I wouldn’t say that it is the majority especially for banks even less safe for tech professionals how did you have that come about how do you build that confidence of easy or do you start out at some small made abs tight yeah big right now yeah I’ve done a few talks at local meetups I’ve done a couple of Sydney ones as well and I think it’s something that anyone can can learn some people naturally do it well start other people have to learn it but I think if you wanted to get into that and you don’t have any saurian and no one’s going out of the way to invite you there’s a lot of meetups that all you have to do is start going and I’ll invite I’ll generally have fewer speakers available than speaking spots if you someone in Newcastle who wants to do especially a Tech Talk now you should should be able to find a time slot somewhere now put your hand up and I will be able to take you for sure yeah definitely now think Newcastle really good um good yeah I guess growing Graham pull that that’s definitely opportunity there’s a people share a story and yeah and not be held out of the room I think um people give you time of day and things one of those things can only be learned through practice right there’s very few people that get up there and now it they want yeah and also a thirst type of events the people in the audience are usually similar type of people does this yes so so bit less pressure it’s probably harder to do a talk that’s to a different audience than what you’re comfortable with yeah like if you’re talking to I don’t know you’re expected to do like some type of motivational talk but you’re a bit of an introvert that’s probably a lot harder but to get up and talk about your technical subject that you know this should be actually less daunting yeah if it’s in your sweet spot it’s about what you know mmm yes definitely how about something is out of your patio Jam right yeah so speaking in the u.s. obviously for coming like yours you know the massive US company but I think it’s been an opportunity that you know they I’ve been no brainer for you to take on being out report and I being away you guys are doing on the map you know in the u.s. is that why do you look at an easy easy thing to get signed off to go yes we’re gonna go across there and do that yeah definitely I mean NID has like a you know a brand in Australia market so you know if you’re representing a company you know you obviously have to do that properly and we have a corporate affairs team and it’s a commis teams internally who definitely help with that I’ll tell you what to say or what not to say you know know how to not tarnish our reputation as a company no review slides and all those things different people from NAB have done talks quite a few different I’ve heard people talk at AWS conferences Salesforce Open Text like some pretty big companies that had us to speak more recently Tyrion which was a local event here in the Orient in so I think anytime your company is like a well-known brand you’ll get more invitations to speak because that is obviously good for the vendor together they like to have recognizable areas talking their kid us yeah but I think for its it’s also good friend ID though because a lot of people go to those conferences and see you kind of associated with these well-respected tech brands so you know it makes attracting talent easier because you know if you go to AWS conference or snowflake summit and you see someone from ni be talking about cloud and big data and all that you think oh realize I’ll doing that kind of like what I went through with the meetup experience each sort of assumed financial services you know there’s probably not much exciting going on here but it’s kind of like almost a pitch to the job market in a way I don’t I think it’s a big part of employer branding and talent attacted tell an attraction um it’s not like few minor vendors I guess you know if it’s a tech professionals that every individuals different motivators would have been lifestyle where the actual location on the lifestyle that you know a company can provide financial stability yada yada yada but the actual text Akram and what they work with is it’s a big bad about it for like tech professionals so they navigate or comprehend stick you know say a company hey there guys using new technologies they’re done really cool projects I think that Sun it’s a big partner especially in tech oh it’s huge because that’s really what you’re gonna be working on is he’s then shaping what you can do in the future so if you get stuck somewhere we were getting left behind in terms of the tech stack you know that that’s actually got cost you almost by not getting not kicking scoot up in those areas I can’t agree more kinda great whites they see a fall behind in technology or a dragon or a company that’s using whole technology and not have an opportunity to upgrade that all to keep their forward very very quickly you can get left behind it’s hard to catch up right yeah it’s hard to go through an inability a new technology coming in okay this is the tech stack I’m using I don’t know we always and it can be a real gap there yeah I think you also see that with you know fifteen years ago graduates are all trying to go and work at the biggest bank or you know government department however they could get into as a graduate program just to get exposure to scale but now you’ll see people go and work for a start-up because they’re doing something innovative and no longer the size of the company on the resume is as less important compared to what you were doing they’re complaining right so it’s an interesting shooters yeah okay what’s the future for a role like yours what’s the future in around we talked about you know didn’t human technologies what do you say or all like he was coming in the future I think there’s so I’ve been pretty busy with kind of a nology refresh really as we move to the cloud there’s a whole new stack to procure and get it all set up and that’s gonna take a while to fully get down but I think my ongoing role is probably around how how that fits in with the broader IT context so my role or the team that I mean is kind of like a group wide team that that’s but across all of the different IT systems you know in the NIV group so more and more business systems going to be basing some of their decisioning on these machine learning models or other kind of decisioning systems so there’s a lot of integration work to get involved in they’re working on solutions where you know you can have data feeds that flow quite nicely where they need to go and then taking those machine learning models and doing something with the output getting it back into another system there’s there’s quite a lot of work in that and a lot of software vendors have a lot of a ways to go to catch up but I think we’re a long way off being outed by something off the shelf that can just plug into the back of the data science teams output young agree should we hold all the way back although I back but back to the investor days you obviously you didn’t agree in Newcastle how beneficiary was that for you yeah it’s always enjoyed this segment of your podcast because there’s a lot of different piece I think I have a pretty I think I have a pretty unbiased view on that because I’ve gone differently for different things that I’ve been interested in so I think for me I had it break that down for me yeah so for example you know when I was younger when I was a teenager or even primary school I wanted to learn music and you know obviously you can do very formal music training and my mom took me to guitar lessons and all their scales and chord progressions but I didn’t really take to that because I just wanted to play songs that I knew no this was the honest so it was all about you know Pearl Jam and Metallica or Nirvana and all those pins so I just wanted to pick up the guitar and play some music and so I ended up learning quite a lot of music just based off grabbing the notation off the internet and just learning it and that’s what I wanted to do so in that situation I didn’t really need this heavy theoretical background to do you know I wasn’t gonna play in an orchestra oh yeah from some you know experimental jazz band or something I just wanted to play some music and you know from that I’d build and eventually did learn scales down the track and all that but that’s that was what worked for me that was the style of learning I liked and got me straight it quicker to what I wanted to do then doing potentially years worth of foundational work before I ever got to do something I enjoyed and when I decided to go to university for computer science it was really just to improve my job prospects I didn’t really expect to learn too much from it but I think in the case of in the case of computer science there were a lot of subjects involved that I probably wouldn’t have done myself if I wasn’t kind of pushed into it so some of the theoretical stuff you know the nature of algorithms and what they are and and some of the stuff that is it a little bit more on the abstract I’m the type of person and there’s people out there who would go and learn them as a hobby yeah I’m probably not one of those people so I think for me that was beneficial to say oh yeah kind of have to do this and stick at it and then eventually you know when you start learning how to code all those concepts shape the way you think even if it’s only subtle so I think for me I I got a lot out of computer science but as I mentioned before it I didn’t learn a lot of the practical stuff until I got my first job so at university you know that to code but I didn’t write any test cases that were automated didn’t really use version control systems all that stuff kind of came in industry which i think is is pretty common grade yeah and I feel like so they think the strength of university is that you can get a lot of those theoretical concepts one of the weaknesses I think is that not all the people doing the teaching are really interested in teaching because sometimes if you’re an academic researcher teaching is kind of part of your load but listen to a podcast the other day kind of said it’s usually like a 40 40 20 comma split so 40% research 40% teaching 20% I guess admin and everything else and so they’re not actually people who are always passionate about teaching and I think what that can mean is that not all lecturers will go out of their way to make a concept easy to understand that’s kind of more like my job is to just present you the textbook but you know what’s what the facts are and you know that’s kind of your job to learn it that’s not true of all of them but there’s definitely a percentage of teachers at university where they’re not actually really passionate about teaching not passionate about imparting knowledge they’re passionate about their research and sustain that job they have to teach as part of it so contrast we’ve you know that online world we’re pretty much the courses that you do online made by people who are trying to make it as easy their whole business model is you understanding the subject matter so that you’ll keep subscribing so that they’re doing everything they can to present a concepts in a way that you understand and I think sometimes in university oh my some academics actually like it to be a bit obscure give you the most formal definition possible you know use as much mathematical notation as possible and automatically half the room don’t get it because that’s not the way they learn but if you present the same theory or idea differently they would get it so I think it’s sad that a lot of people probably think all that concepts beyond me maybe they drop out of uni but actually it just needed to be presented you know a bit more easily so I think universities will have to compete against law against companies that are trying to make learning accessible rather than having this high esteem and trying to make things sort of difficult but that’s my take and I know that if you were trying to design or give somebody the best upstart to talk real like yes right to become a dinner architect mean has quicker that’s creeks are as efficient or effective method possible what’s the first two years look like is it a mix of formal education and non formal sounds like this definitely a mix of industry in there there is definitely industry for sure I don’t think there’s a shortcut you kinda have to do a bit of all of those things I think what sort of split are we talking so there’s definitely and it depends data science even as a as a per student has a number of different kind of roles with unit you could probably find five ten different team members in some data science teams you know so if you want it to be in my role which is very much on the kind of technology side so understanding systems integration you know how to get how to get data from one system to another how to process it at scale how to remove bottlenecks and all those things I would definitely try and get a very well-rounded technology you know don’t be afraid to get your hands on some infrastructure citizen DevOps do some coding and I think that more generalist you are the more the more broad your IT knowledge ease the better I think if you go into it only ever having maybe been a just a developer you’ll have to end up cross schooling into all those areas anyway you have to know infrastructure yeah and I think if you’re if you’re really wanting to focus on let someone else take care of that side and really focus on just training models machine learning I’d do it just a data science course that just focused on that I think there’s I don’t know of any off the top of my head but you can do them online either through a university or just through just an education their websites and they would probably take you through some foundations or statistics and kind of the just enough maths to to understand what you’re doing and then they’ll go on and teach you how to code so you probably use Python or are encoding is a probably a different skill I don’t think you have to be an amazing coder to be a data scientist because you’re not building very big systems you’re generally scripting short pieces of logic so I mean it helps to be good coder but these days people can kind of go straight into that role without having build software for industry yeah yeah nice side sounds like the flame makes it like an industry like I’ve really broad graduate I know where you get hands-on a few bits yeah bit like a bread some knowledge which is pretty much where you did your backup gun that’s really cool yeah well Riley I think they call that t-shirt learning they’re done yeah and then you know I’ve like that yeah that’s fine yeah as like that means sent more specific formal and informal trainings most definitely for me I’ve always done a lot of had a lot of hobbies outside work that technical you know if if during the periods of my career where I wasn’t coding much for example was you know managing a team of sis admins I would tend to do more coding as a hobby than when I was coding full-time I I would just be an off it I go home so I think as long as you’re kind of working on I think find something you’re interested in that you have complete autonomy over so that’s usually a hobby unless you have your own business it’s usually got to be a hobby so for me that’s taken a few forms over the years I’ve had pet projects that I’ve worked on where I’m the one deciding how it’s built and what what technologies it’s built in and then you get to avoid all that frustration of I want to do this thing at work but they don’t let me because of some reason I’ve done it things from men even if it’s building like a video game you know there’s coding involved in that and it’s something that you find enjoyable and you get to kind of shape it yourself get really get creative and do everything on your own terms I think some of my best learning has come from those things I think I’ll take professions that have an interesting technology we’ll build some projects outside I’d say to any graduate that’s looking to work build something yeah let’s build something yeah don’t take somebody it’s got yeah paper code you’re sitting good hop back out there thank you only something that’s built I’ll take that over a piece of paper in degree and a high market any day of the week and if so you get a lot of Linux out of that right a lot of learnings out of teaching yourself fine again away moving on way if you you know the way you can drive yeah it’s raw trances Babylon that yeah well Google’s some kind of like a essential part of tech job these days you’re gonna look at wait a minute bit yeah that does it the short answer the information is readily available right yeah you do a little bit socially know how to search yeah yeah you mentioned outside of sort of formal education there’s a couple of things you’ve done is there any any way that you’d point people from an educational perspective from a if it’s particularly around data and leagues I’ve filled in some small gaps I guess over the years from data camp is good site so four or five years ago it was probably one of the one of the big ones or one of the only ones that now there’s probably a lot more I found early on Cagle was good it’s a website where it made people can post competitions for predictive modeling so a company board someone might post a data set and you have to train a model on that data set and then score some sample data and they basically have leaderboards and that’s a good website because a you get to learn on some real data you have some chance of winning competition although these days that professionals with a lot of experience in the window yeah but you also get a lot of the people in that community are really good at sharing what they know so you’ll often see people who want a competition yeah that maybe you had a tryout winning yeah will then go and post the code that they wrote to get the winning entry and you might learn something each time about a new technique for maybe the way you prepared the data or some of the parameters that you see it’s kind of good nice and a feedback loop you get to be a part of a competition a little gamification in ourselves right like yeah you get it more nope yeah yeah any providers as well even as things as basic as badges right yes for the different things you’ve done but through so competitions like that yeah and yeah I think there’s for me some some of what I learned is a little bit on the fringe as well so I I’m really interested in general AI so learning algorithms that can be used for any problem so that there’s a company I follow called Numenta that have a podcast and they kind of post all their research online as well the various or open research company that that may not be something you get to go and use at work because they’re still developing and it doesn’t really work or work in the industry yet but it’s kind of good to have whatever you think is kind of the next horizon maybe in five or ten years to at least be thinking about and try and follow it as it develops rather than usually something happens and then everyone’s scrambling to try and learn it or yeah scale up and implement but if he can kind of be a breast breast of it ahead of time I like to do it me too that sort of reading as well and us on the reading part any books that you’d recommend for people books I’ve been pretty slack with books in the last few years especially young kids it’s hard to find time to rebook I do this into a lot of podcasts obviously this one but otherwise as well the one I just mentioned it’s called new mentor or intelligence that’s that’s really interesting I do branched out a little bit and listen to things like history related stuff hardcore history is a good podcast if you ever want to just kind of step back and think about something a bit more the broader than technology and more kind of just general interest stuff I’ve got a mate who has a podcast called publish perish a podcast is a it’s about academic life which I’ve never worked in academia but I started listen to because it’s pretty funny so few researchers in this podcast and they just talk about life in the academic world and it’s nice sure that it’s an interesting people yeah just the way you have to what you have to do to have a career in that very Aaron this is it’s a good value to listen to books wise and again on the education thing with with AI I think in the next few years that it will start to borrow a lot of concepts from biology which I learn about how human brain works to try and reverse engineer some of that and make the learning a bit more generalized yeah so I kind of realized a few years ago some of the good research that’s happening he’s starting to include neuroscience you know but I don’t know anything that ecology so lost terrible topology I’m not very good with names so as tempting as it was to go and study the door science degree or or something like I figured that would be a bad idea for me so I kind of focusing on areas of neuroscience just enough to answer whatever question I have about a particular part of that research yeah nice and so I’ve read some books on neuroscience just kind of for beginners and I’ve even got a coloring book that that’s great because it was actually I forget the name of it I got it from Amazon but some neuroscientists made this coloring book and it’s got the basically coloring past the brain and they’ve made it so that they’ve used that technique that makes it easy to learn so by picking certain colors consistently using them in different contexts it helps you learn so it’s learning about the brain in a way that the brains could have learning ducts that’s kind of a bit because and I enjoy that it’s kind of relaxing you can sit there coloring in you know it’s actually really exiting without taking learning yeah on that I think that’s about her that’s about the day thank you.