local maxima
Tomorrow I'm taking the train from Elche to Madrid. Again. Four days with the team, then back - we do this every month now, last week always in the office. As I pack my bag for the seventh time, I can't shake this feeling: I'
polyworking: why one job isn't enough anymore
2024 was the year of doing everything at once for me. I jiggled a full-time job as an engineer, teaching data science and AI engineering, mentoring, some consulting gigs, attempts at building my own product, a bit of writing. It was exhausting. Also kind of addictive. There's definitely
a loop is all you need: building conversational ai agents
After months of building AI agents, I've come to a counterintuitive conclusion: those fancy agent frameworks everyone seems to be using? You probably don't need them. Let me explain how I got here. essential complexity is not in tech A few months ago, I joined an
debugging my twenties: that summer in france
In summer 2014, after my sophomore year in Kazakhstan, I went to Toulouse for French classes. It was my first time traveling alone, and it completely reset how I saw the world. before going solo Growing up in Kazakhstan, I was lucky to travel with my family. By the time
writing in public: what i discovered during my 8-month writing break
Eight months ago, I stopped writing. Not intentionally, it just happened. One week turned into a month, then several, and suddenly I found myself staring at a blog that hadn't been updated since late 2024. In that time, I wrapped up three years at Capchase (it was time
my take on education and learning
Why, despite living in an age of unprecedented access to knowledge, do so many people feel that education is fundamentally broken? As someone who has navigated the world of formal education, self-study, and teaching, I’ve picked up insights that I’d like to share. As we all "stand
learn to sell: b2b sales lessons from microsoft
I haven't written for more than two months now, which means that I broke a "contract" with myself of writing and publishing something at least once every week. It has been weird time for me overall, but regardless let's see if I return to
why i started my tech career as a sales engineer @ microsoft
For the past few years my day-to-day activity was writing code. In 2016? Doing PowerPoint slides and making calls. Lots of calls. I am currently Software Engineer and Data Scientist at Capchase, FinTech scale-up, working mostly on Risk Intelligence. That's what everyone sees on the top of my
generalist or specialist? choose between startup & enterprise
The main difference I noticed between being data scientist at a startup and big corporation reduces to the same topic of "generalist versus specialist" or "T-shaped versus V-shaped". Let me elaborate on this. big corp At the big corporation, like Volvo Cars, there are so many
everyone should have a personal website
When everything is googleable, every modern professional already has an online presence. Here some random links that appear when I google my name: From the privacy and security perspective it is not great and I don't like it. However, if you can't make it go away,
how i teach python for data science
intro In this blog post I share my syllabus for teaching introductory Python for aspiring data scientists. Python is one of the most widely used programming languages and is one of the key languages in working with data, so no introduction is required from my side. However, since many engineers
how i got the data science interview with a cool scale-up without cv
If you want to get a remote job, you need to stand out among global pool of candidates and CV isn't a great tool to achieve that. old way of getting interview which doesn't work anymore I have been using CV in job search since 2014,