Navigating Machine Learning: From GitHub to FastAI

Today we’re joined by Hamel Husain, Staff Machine Learning Engineer at GitHub. 

Over the last few years, Hamel has had the opportunity to work on some of the most popular open source projects in the ML world, including fast.ai, nbdev, fastpages, and fastcore, just to name a few. In our conversation with Hamel, we discuss his journey into Silicon Valley, and how he discovered that the ML tooling and infrastructure weren’t quite as advanced as he’d assumed, and how that led him to help build some of the foundational pieces of Airbnb’s Bighead Platform. 

We also spend time exploring Hamel’s time working with Jeremy Howard and the team creating fast.ai, how nbdev came about, and how it plans to change the way practitioners interact with traditional jupyter notebooks. Finally, talk through a few more tools in the fast.ai ecosystem, fastpages, fastcore, how these tools interact with Github Actions, and the up and coming ML tools that Hamel is excited about. 

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/532.