Now - October 2024

Currently on a three week trip to the UK, including stops in Newcastle, Manchester, London and a road trip through Scotland (Inverness, Fort William, Oban, Loch Lomond, Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews, Aberdeen, and Speyside).

Job updates #

In August 2024, Zelus was acquired by Teamworks - a company that aims to be the “Operating System of Sports”. My understanding thus far is that TW is aiming to be rather like a Salesforce platform for sport clubs and orgs - managing communications, documents, schedules, sleep and nutrition, recruitment etc. Seems like a very large presence in US college sports and pro clubs. The transition has been a bit awkwardly handled (as all M&A ops seem to be) - as the dust settles, it seems that the Zelus org will be operated as a new “onfield analytics” part of the larger platform and continue on more or less the same as before. Transition pains aside, the Zelus stock shares turning into a chunk of change is a nice bonus!

I had been gunning pretty hard for a promotion over the last year and worked a lot more than I’d initially planned. The acquisition timing was pretty stressful (right before annual reviews were due to happen) and I was very worried about it throwing a wrench into the works, but I’m very pleased to have my efforts rewarded with a promotion to Senior ML Engineer!

UK trip, featuring surprise conference talk #

I’d given several conference talks last year (online at ShinyConf and again at Shiny in Production) and while I enjoy the idea of giving a talk and sometimes the actual delivery process of giving a talk, it gave me enough stress and anxiety beforehand that I promised myself to only attend conferences this year by using my allocated budget + any personal money I wanted to use.

However…a few weeks before the conference, I was asked by Colin Gillespie to give a lightning talk at Shiny in Production (seeing as I was already planning to attend). A little torn, I decided that a five minute talk couldn’t be too bad and pitched “a minimal shiny infrastructure for serving 95,000 monthly users”. Turns out I’m too good at pitching talks because I promptly got promoted to a full 25 minute talk 😅. Ended up regretting it because work circumstances had me unable to work on the talk until the day before the talk, so I found myself working on slides until 3am and then winged it on stage. I’m told the talk went great, so that much is good!

The rest of the UK trip has been much less stressful: a visit to Manchester for Statsbomb Conference the day after Shiny in Production, then back to London for a Zelus Soccer onsite (absolutely adore my teammates and every chance I get to hang out with them), and now doing a road trip through the scottish highlands ish.

Working on #

Disconnecting / not working, then when I’m back will restart work stuff in earnest. Also, trying to hire a few R engineers to work with me on Zelus Soccer. If you’re reading this and interested, please let me know!