Ludovico Bessi
ML engineer @Google
I love the beginning of a new year!
Table of Contents
Introduction
I love the period between the end of the year and the start of a new year.
I don’t like new year resolutions like “I will go to the gym”, but I feel like it’s a great time to reflect on what happened in the past year and what’s coming up next.
So… Let’s reflect! :)
What happened in 2023?
TLDR: I am back to deep dives in my free time and writing about it!
2023 was an interesting year for me (us?).
It was a year where I had decided to focus mostly on my career progression @Google while commiting to 1 weekly post for my newsletter Machine learning at Scale.
It has been hard!
Layoffs happended across the industry: morale was low and stress was high.
Still, there have been a few successes along the way:
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I managed to commit for ~9 months with the weekly newsletter. I have been proud of some articles, but mostly I felt like I had to write them versus enjoying the process of researching and writing about things.
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I managed to get promoted from L3 to L4 on my second try, woah!
What’s changing in 2024 for me?
I want to double down on what worked:
Career
My career trajectory is exactly where I had hoped it’d be.
I want to take on more responsabilities at work as that makes me feel energized.
Not much to add here.
Newsletter
The idea of starting a newsletter is something I don’t regret.
I cherish the posts that I have written where I felt like I had learnt something new myself.
I commit to only writing posts that I enjoy writing.
I will not focus only on System design topics, but I will detour wherever I feel like there is something I want to talk about.
Still, I will focus on three macro areas to keep things constrained:
- Machine learning system design: the original topics of the newsletter. I am deeply interested in the space and I feel like it’s under discussed.
- Graph neural networks: I think they are cool. Enough said!
- All things LLM related: I am not one for jumping on hype-trains, but… there is just so much cool innovation going on in the space I can’t resist diving into it.
Software products
I want to exercise more my product side of brain.
Just building something small and tiny that solves a specific issue.
I know that this goal feels underdefined, but I am already working on some small things on the side.
It’s enjoyable to use some outside-world tools and create something you own end to end.
And now, I can’t wait to check in late 2024 to see what I accomplished this year :D
Ludo