The More You Share, the More You Learn
Our clients often ask us, “Where do you find the time to share knowledge so often?” Our answer is simple: it’s not about finding the time; it’s about finding the energy.
We Xebians thrive through knowledge sharing. It is our favorite part of the job because we learn so much from it. And the more we share, the more we learn. The more we build the habits to share knowledge in our company (like our biweekly knowledge exchange sessions), the more momentum we get. And we’ve been doing this for years.
We bring you here the summary of the insights we shared during Q2, in particular:
- Everything you need to deploy Large Language Models in your company: a thorough whitepaper on How to Prioritize LLM Use Cases and blog posts by Rens, Jetze, and Jasper.
- Our latest events, including two Data Learning Weeks, the Food and Data Symposium, and Eva’s interview with the Netherlands State Secretary for Digital Affairs and Kingdom Relations.
- Our contributions to Analytics engineering: dbt Meetups, Padraic’s talk at MDS Fest, and the ground-breaking book Fundamentals of Analytics Engineering, written by seven of our consultants.
We hope you enjoy them, share them, and learn from them.
Our Knowledge Sharing Misson on Meetups
Jochem Loedeman organized the MLOps Community Amsterdam Meetup, which featured the talk “ML Platform: From Custom Solution to Enterprise Maturity” and the demo “Building Your First RAG Locally With Llama 3, Milvus, and Friends.”
Juan Manuel Perafán co-organized the 6th edition of the NL dbt Meetup, held at the Databricks office, and the 7th edition, where Pádraic Slattery spoke about “Operating a dbt Mesh at Kramp.”
Last but not least, Bo Lemmers and Sebastian Atkinson organized the 10th edition of the Analytics Engineering Meetup, where Thomas van Latum gave a talk titled “Data Fortification: Safeguarding Sensitive Insights in Data Development.” Dumky de Wilde also launched the Fundamentals of Analytics Engineering book at this event.
Xebia Data Conferences and Events
PyData Eindhoven 2024
Xebia was a Platinum sponsor of PyData Eindhoven 2024. We also had Xebia’s own Jeroen Overschie delivering a talk on “The Levels of RAG.”
PyData Berlin
Usman Zafar presented a talk at PyData Berlin titled “Using LLMs to Create Knowledge Graphs From a Large Corpus of Parliamentary Debates.”
Food & Data Symposium
We organized the Food & Data Symposium in Den Bosch. Our customers Sligro, JET, and Enza Zaden took the stage. We also had Rogier van der Geer presenting Forecasting at Scale at Ahold and Sander van Donkelaar discussing Cutting Through the Hype: Practical Strategies for Implementing Generative AI in Your Business.
Data & AI Dinner
We sat down with a few selected current and previous clients to share experiences and discuss the future of Data and AI. All accompanied by great food and wine.
AI Winter Jam, MeasureCamp Spain and MDS Fest
Conferences and meet-ups that we co-organize are not all; we also took part in third-party events:
- Dumky de Wilde spoke at MeasureCamp Spain.
- Pádraic Slattery delivered a presentation at MDS Fest titled, “Empowering dbt Developers: Self-Serve dbt Cloud Scheduling From Your dbt Repo.”
- Mariam Halfhide was on stage at the AI Winter Jam
2x Data Learning Weeks and Data Summer School
We hosted two Data Learning Weeks with great results. More than 250 people joined us for two weeks of training tasters given by our experts, Lysanne, Enrico, David, Steven, Tennyson, and Nitin.
In the second week of August, we organized our first-ever Data Summer School, with sessions about Data Analysis, Data Science, Gen AI, and more.
Princess Máxima hackathon and Green AI paper
Jetze Schuurmans, Shu Zhao, Sander van Donkelaar, and Julian de Ruiter built a prototype at the Princess Máxima hackathon of a stuffed toy that can have meaningful, empathetic conversations with sick children to help them in difficult times.
On the other hand, Jetze Schuurmans co-authored a position paper on Tensor Networks and Green AI.
De Dataloog
Eva Bosma interviewed the Netherlands State Secretary for Digital Affairs and Kingdom Relations on the De Dataloog podcast (in Dutch.)
Xebia Data Blog Contributions
The last quarter was full of inspiring blog posts around LLMs, ML, and Data Modelling. Just to mention a few:
- DIY LLM Evaluation, a Case Study of Rhyming in ABBA Schema by Rens Dimmendaal
- Winners Recipe for Finetuning LLMs by Jetze Schuurmans
- Machine learning model serving architectures by Roy van Santen
- Distributed Dashboarding with DuckDB-Wasm, could it be the future of BI? by Ramon Vermeulen
- How to Share Azure DevOps CI/CD Templates Across Teams by Kris Geusebroek
- The ever-changing role of Data Modeling by Ricardo Granados
Until Next Quarter
As you can see, Q2 2024 was a busy and exciting period of knowledge sharing for our Data & AI team at Xebia. From insightful events to informative blog posts, we continue to drive innovation in Data and AI. Stay tuned for more awesome updates in the coming quarters! Follow us on Linkedin!