Rob de Wit
Utrecht, the Netherlands
About me
I like working with data to help people solve problems. Although I am comfortable with the "harder" aspects of data engineering and data science, I firmly believe that tech shouldn't be self-serving. What I like doing best is connecting with people, sharing knowledge, and discovering how data can help improve life and work.
I have an educational background in business informatics and hands-on experience as a data engineer and analyst. I also worked as a developer advocate for an MLOps startup.
Friends and colleagues describe me as ambitious, decisive, and result-oriented. The question I like to ask most is "Why?" and the answer I would rather not hear is "Because we have always done it this way."
The thing I value most in my work is ownership. I love being able to point at something and say: "I made that." My dream job is one where I can combine deep technical work with a more people-focused role.
Now
I currently work as a data platform engineer under the trade name binary3. Together with the great team at Wolk, I am designing and implementing a data platform for ELEO.
Outside work, I keep busy with photography, learning Spanish, and climbing. I aim to get my lead-climbing certificate next year, although I'll need to improve my climbing skills first. My partner and I also just adopted an adorable puppy.
#opentoworkI will probably be looking for a new freelance assignment by the end of the year, so please get in touch if you have any exciting opportunities.
Contact
Here are my details if you would like to get in touch:
Public speaking
Lately I have been lucky enough to get the opportunity to speak at several events:
- 2023-11-29 Track host at CreativIT Stichting Nationaal informatica Congres, Utrecht
- 2023-04-20 Transforming a Jupyter Notebook into a reproducible pipeline for ML experiments PyCon US, Salt Lake City — Slides | Talk recording
- 2023-02-21 GitOps for ML: Converting Notebooks to Reproducible Pipelines DataTalks.Club, Online — Workshop recording
- 2022-12-02 Becoming a Pokémon Master with DVC: reproducible machine learning experiments PyData Eindhoven — Talk recording
- 2022-10-06 Becoming a Pokémon Master with DVC: Experiment Pipelines for Deep Learning Projects Deep Learning World, Berlin
- 2021-10-21 The measurable world Guest lecture at Utrecht University
- 2020-06-15 Fraud & Data at bol.com Studievereniging Sticky, online
Blog posts
I like to share some of the stuff I learned through blog posts. Here's a list of what I've written thus far:
- Setting up a remote NAS with Tailscale to manage my photo archives
- From Jupyter Notebook to DVC pipeline for reproducible ML experiments (↪ for Iterative)
- CML Cloud Runners for Model Training in Bitbucket Pipelines (↪ for Iterative)
- Turn Visual Studio Code into a machine learning experimentation platform with the DVC extension (↪ for Iterative)
- Training and saving models with CML on a self-hosted AWS EC2 runner - part 2 (↪ for Iterative)
- Training and saving models with CML on a self-hosted AWS EC2 runner - part 1 (↪ for Iterative)
- Lessons learnt forcing data science measures upon my colleagues
- A boring truth: your meeting needs an agenda
Projects
Outside of work I love trekking through nature and sleeping in a tent. When not travelling, I really enjoy organising stuff. Perhaps you might know me from one of the events I have organised in the past: