what i've been up to
I’ve been pretty absent publicly for a couple months now, and I’ve decided that I need to make more of an effort informing people around me what I’m up to.
These past few months have been have been a rollercoaster in terms of what I spend my days working on.
Let’s start with the launch of Paraglide in March. That, in all open-ness, went okay. After a couple of weeks, while I did have a good community of users, their usage became stagnant.
I quickly found out that fitting this sort of grammerized workflow in any enterprise use-case would be challenging. Getting someone to move from a for example, PyTorch + NVIDIA stack to a completely new, fairly untested, piece of software was going to be very difficult.
I’m not saying this is impossible, but you’d have to move mountains for this to happen. And it’d require lots more resources, trust, and community push to do this successfully. This is something i’m eyeing for the future.
After a couple of months of working with my users, and trying to grow adoption (which was fairly unsuccessful) several opportunities presented themselves. One of our clients had a new section of interests, and wondered if Paraglide could build something for them.
It was a bit of a different direction, but recognizing that a bit of pivot was required, I began working on what they wanted. In turn, Paraglide began to move into the data annotation space. We began building a platform to help managers analyze their annotation workforces.
ML companies, often have workforces with hundreds of annotators. Especially if you’re using a pre-existing tool like AWS SageMaker, it’s very difficult to understand your pipeline. This presents Paraglide with a unique opportunity in this space.
Meanwhile, Paraglide won the Pioneer Tournament!
After working heads-down on this annotation platform for a couple of weeks, I realized that my old Paraglide ML code was just sitting around in a private GitHub repository. I decided to go back to my roots, and open-source it under a library called Nylon.
That’s where i’m currently at. Working on balancing my time between Nylon and building the annotation platform. After I can get this annotation system tested out and fully functional with this first client, I plan to commercialize it and release it for everyone! Oh yeah, and I’ve decided to call this new system Turbine.