This is the bio I typically use for conferences:
Vincent is a senior data professional who worked as an engineer, researcher, team lead, and educator in the past. You might know him from tech talks with an attempt to defend common sense over hype in data science. He is especially interested in understanding algorithmic systems so that one may prevent failure. As such, there has always been a preference for simpler solutions that scale, as opposed to the latest and greatest from the tech industry.
Sometimes I also add this bit:
Vincent is also well known for creating a lot of open-source packages, some of which have been downloaded over a million times. He's also well known for his calmcode.io project, as well his blog over at koaning.io.
Fun Facts
I also keep a list of fun facts that people might know me for.
- me on the front page of reddit
- proud creator of calmcode.io
- a digital nomad with an amazing postcard
- a preferred Rstudio training partner
- co-founder and co-chair of PyData Amsterdam
- co-founder of the satRdays Amsterdam conference
- co-creator of some open source packages
- a data/open source evangelist with a track record of speaking
- involved with many data projects
- helping out with the normconf conference
- featured in a 3b1b maths video
- featured in a freeCodeCamp video
Currently
I currently work over at marimo where I do a bit of engineering and help out with the ecosystem of new notebook tools.
Past
Before joining marimo I worked as a outreach engineer over at probabl with the scikit-learn people. Before that I was a machine learning engineer over at Explosion who are behind tools such as spaCy and Prodigy. Working here was a blast! Before joining Explosion, I worked as a Research Advocate at Rasa where I collaborated with the research team to explain and understand conversational systems better.
I was also a consultant for a bit. But I am still recovering from that.
Concluding
I believe in open tools and I certainly don’t mind to evangelise from time to time. But it does feel like a lot of tools are still missing.
The future is pretty awesome, all we have to do is build it.
Note
This blog has a matured a few times in the past. An earlier version built with Pelican can be found here. A more recent version, built with Distill, can be found here. On every upgrade I only decided to port a subset of the blogposts, partially to save time, but also because the blog matures over time ... and some of the old blogposts feel less relevant.