Self-taught Kaggle Champ: Engineering to Data Science to AI

You don't need a degree in data science to become a top professional in the field. Here's how one Kaggle data science champion taught himself. Now Gilberto Titericz is moving from Airbnb to AI startup Ople.The technology job of the decade may just be data scientist or machine learning technologist. These highly sought-after professionals command high pay, have their choice of positions, and usually enjoy great work/life balance. While many may pursue online courses, bootcamps, or formal advanced degree programs to learn the skills they need to pursue a data science or machine learning career, it is possible to switch careers and teach yourself data science. That's what Kaggle grand master Gilberto Titericz did. Kaggle ranked Titericz as the top data scientist for more than two years. (Google acquired Kaggle in March 2017.) But his career began in a different field. Titericz started off with an master's degree in electrical engineering, and he worked as an engineer for several years in his home country of Brazil. But in 2011, Titericz found another passion -- data science. He looked for programming competitions and found Kaggle, the data science community and competition site. "I started to compete in new competitions every month," Titericz told InformationWeek in an interview. "I joined in over 100 competitions." Titericz was working his day job as an engineer and spent about 30 hours a week of his free time working on data science and Kaggle competitions. He did not take online courses. Instead, he taught himself by studying the public examples of data science code. He knew MatLab from his work as an engineer. He taught himself R and Python along the way. "Having an engineering background helps data scientists," he said. Titericz learned by doing the competitions.

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Airbyte Racks Up Awards from InfoWorld, BigDATAwire, Built In; Builds Largest and Fastest-Growing User Community

Airbyte | January 30, 2024

Airbyte, creators of the leading open-source data movement infrastructure, today announced a series of accomplishments and awards reinforcing its standing as the largest and fastest-growing data movement community. With a focus on innovation, community engagement, and performance enhancement, Airbyte continues to revolutionize the way data is handled and processed across industries. “Airbyte proudly stands as the front-runner in the data movement landscape with the largest community of more than 5,000 daily users and over 125,000 deployments, with monthly data synchronizations of over 2 petabytes,” said Michel Tricot, co-founder and CEO, Airbyte. “This unparalleled growth is a testament to Airbyte's widespread adoption by users and the trust placed in its capabilities.” The Airbyte community has more than 800 code contributors and 12,000 stars on GitHub. Recently, the company held its second annual virtual conference called move(data), which attracted over 5,000 attendees. Airbyte was named an InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award finalist: Data Management – Integration (in October) for cutting-edge products that are changing how IT organizations work and how companies do business. And, at the start of this year, was named to the Built In 2024 Best Places To Work Award in San Francisco – Best Startups to Work For, recognizing the company's commitment to fostering a positive work environment, remote and flexible work opportunities, and programs for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Today, the company received the BigDATAwire Readers/Editors Choice Award – Big Data and AI Startup, which recognizes companies and products that have made a difference. Other key milestones in 2023 include the following. Availability of more than 350 data connectors, making Airbyte the platform with the most connectors in the industry. The company aims to increase that to 500 high-quality connectors supported by the end of this year. More than 2,000 custom connectors were created with the Airbyte No-Code Connector Builder, which enables data connectors to be made in minutes. Significant performance improvement with database replication speed increased by 10 times to support larger datasets. Added support for five vector databases, in addition to unstructured data sources, as the first company to build a bridge between data movement platforms and artificial intelligence (AI). Looking ahead, Airbyte will introduce data lakehouse destinations, as well as a new Publish feature to push data to API destinations. About Airbyte Airbyte is the open-source data movement infrastructure leader running in the safety of your cloud and syncing data from applications, APIs, and databases to data warehouses, lakes, and other destinations. Airbyte offers four products: Airbyte Open Source, Airbyte Self-Managed, Airbyte Cloud, and Powered by Airbyte. Airbyte was co-founded by Michel Tricot (former director of engineering and head of integrations at Liveramp and RideOS) and John Lafleur (serial entrepreneur of dev tools and B2B). The company is headquartered in San Francisco with a distributed team around the world. To learn more, visit airbyte.com.

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