Dominic Whyte’s Post

Data ingestion ✅  Data transformation ✅  Data visualization. Often performed with a variety of tools. Often backed by a spreadsheet or a database. Often hard to set up and, even more, to maintain. We are coming

Mom, I won my first hackathon! 😃 This was a *very* fun experience Last week, Wordware (YC S24) launched on Product Hunt. They got over 6k upvotes 🤯 (Typically you need ~800 upvotes to be crowned "Product of the day", so this is big deal.) To celebrate the launch, the Wordware team threw a Hackathon in San Francisco. The goal? Use Wordware to build fun & useful products with words (words + software = Wordware 💡) How should I describe Wordware? It's like Notion, Make.com & a bunch of AI models had a baby. You use a Notion-like "/" command to tell AI what you'd like it to do, you do something with the output of every step, you then get a production-ready API to run the whole flow you built. It lets you scrape online search results, run code, do cool stuff with the result of every step using LLMs, and much more. The possibilities are endless. 🔥 We had a lot of fun building stuff with Jeffrey & Kevin for Cycle App Thanks Filip, Daniel, Olav, Robert & team for the pizza's & good vibes. You're onto something big 👀

I'll be giving the invited talk "Unifying nonlinearly constrained nonconvex optimization" at JuMP-dev 2024 in July. Thank you for your invitation and see you on July 20th! Abstract: Derivative-based iterative methods for nonlinearly constrained nonconvex optimization usually share common algorithmic components, such as strategies for computing a descent direction and mechanisms that promote global convergence. Based on this observation, we introduce an abstract framework with four common ingredients that describes most derivative-based iterative methods and unifies their workflows. We then present Uno, a modular C++ solver that implements our abstract framework and allows the automatic generation of various strategy combinations with no programming effort from the user. Uno is meant to (1) organize mathematical optimization strategies into a coherent hierarchy; (2) offer a wide range of efficient and robust methods that can be compared for a given instance; (3) reduce the cost of development and maintenance of multiple optimization solvers; and (4) enable researchers to experiment with novel optimization strategies while leveraging established subproblem solvers and interfaces to modeling languages. We demonstrate that Uno is highly competitive against state-of-the-art solvers such as filterSQP, IPOPT, SNOPT, MINOS, LANCELOT, LOQO and CONOPT on a set of 429 problems from the CUTEst collection. Uno is available as open-source software under the MIT license at https://lnkd.in/ehGBGYXk. #optimization #julia #jump #jumpdev #unosolver

🗓️ Reminder! We're just one week away from our special Meetup at Reacteev! Mark your calendars for Monday, June 3rd at 7 PM to meet Woody Zuill, the inventor of Software Teaming (Mob Programming). Software Teaming is a collaborative, cost-effective, and enjoyable method for achieving collective development goals. It promotes a whole-team approach where programming, design, testing, and stakeholder engagement are conducted collaboratively. During this session, Woody will share the key principles that have shaped the Software Teaming approach: 1. Creating an environment where everyone can thrive. 2. Amplifying successful practices. 3. Addressing communication challenges and effective strategies. 4. Encouraging dynamic leadership within the team. 5. Cultivating strong teamwork and collaboration skills. After the conference, join us for networking over drinks. 🥂 If you haven't registered yet, there's still time! Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/emZhrMNR

Simplify, Accelerate, Automate: OnBord is Your Gateway To Growth

Curious how to build a simple RAG? Here’s a sample code snippet that explains how to make a RAG model using PDF documents. I wrote this code for a hackathon for parsing PDF documents for a debate assistant. https://lnkd.in/gK8Ayi35

👾 32 hours — 28 people — 7 projects   Last Thursday and Friday, we held our very first hackathon at Luigi's Box. We focused on topics that will improve our services, mainly for existing and new customers. On topics that we were able to build into a working MVP within 32 hours.   I was amazed by how creative people can be when they focus on a single project. Without any disturbance from other colleagues, no emails to answer, no slack messages, and no calls. Just focus with a group of people on the same topic.   It reminded me of the moments in the early beginnings of Luigi's Box, when we were working days and nights, iterating our ideas and building the MVP.   It was definitely not the last hackathon.   #creativity #teamwork #focus #hackathon

Did you log back in on January 2nd to find a slew of workflow errors in Slack? We're calling this the workflow hangover. Prefect wants to make all types of engineering teams more efficient in curing this type of hangover by: ⬇️ Reducing debugging time through observability metrics and dependency visualizations 📆 Decreasing infra cost by running workflows only when events happen and provisioning just the right amount of infra on your behalf Read about the features Prefect delivered in 2023 to increase your ROI as an engineering team👇 https://vist.ly/uve7

🌟 Just Wrapped My First 24-Hour Hackathon at COEP MindSpark 🌟 We built an end-to-end solution for a Voice-Enabled Medicine Reminder for Senior Citizens – all in just 24 hours! 🚀 It was an exhilarating experience, coding through the night, delivering features like OCR-based prescription processing and Google Home integration, and even throwing in a few bonus functionalities! Here’s what we built: OCR for Prescriptions – Snap a picture, and get reminders based on it. Voice Input – No prescription? Simply dictate your meds (our bonus feature!). Google Home Integration – Audio alerts on smart speakers without any wake-up words. Managing Multiple Family Members – Reminders tailored around mealtimes for each family member. Medicine Marketplace – We went the extra mile with an integrated marketplace. This full-stack solution, built with NextJS, MongoDB, Python, FastAPI, EasyOCR, and more, wouldn’t have been possible without my amazing teammates Varad Deshpande and Kabeer Ahmed Merchant. We worked in perfect sync, and thanks to detailed planning and communication, we completed everything without a single merge conflict! While we didn't win, it came down to approach and what the juries were looking for. Sometimes, it’s not just about building the best solution but aligning with specific preferences and requirements. Still, we were proud to be one of the few teams that successfully integrated smart speaker functionality. The experience taught us so much, and I’m grateful for the collaboration. Looking forward to the next challenge! Check out our demo below 👇

Following this post, here is a short excerpts from my speech as host in the hackathon’s closing ceremony.