Umuzi Academy Does Data and Sheena O'Connell keeps us cool with Airflow

Greetings Fellow Data-ites,

Tonight we have an amazing lineup of incredible speakers.

We have Dr Michelle Hoogenhout of Umuzi Academy sharing with us "How do you hire the best talent?" In an age when experienced tech talent is almost as rare as the mythical unicorns they wish to work for, devs and data scientists find themselves inundated with offers from competing employers. At Umuzi, our aim is to find and develop the next generation of tech, creative, and strategy talent. This talk will focus on our approach to training and selecting the best un(der)employed non-graduate youth for junior data science, data engineering and web development roles. I discuss pitfalls and progress in providing tech learnerships, how companies can benefit from partnering with tech bootcamps, and how data science can improve candidate selection and retention.

Dr Michelle Hoogenhout is the head data scientist at Umuzi, a non-profit organisation helping young people to develop the skills to access digital careers. Michelle teaches analytics, programming and database skills. Her work also encompasses helping Umuzi and partner companies leverage their data to improve their business strategy, designing aptitude tests to assess talent, and holding workshops on data science, presentation and interpersonal skills. In her previous position, she lectured in statistics and cognitive neuroscience, and researched developmental disorders in African populations. Michelle has published articles and book chapters on displaying data, using clustering to predict developmental disorder severity, and research methodology. Michelle holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Cape Town and a neuropsychiatric genetics fellowship with the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

Sheena O'Connell will share with us the amazing tool called Airflow.

People don't want data - what they really want is insight. Or even better, actionable insight. Now the road from data to insights can be a bit of a beast. Take Airbnb as an example - it started as a scrappy social hack and grew into a large and data-driven company. When they were small so was their data, but as the company and technical architecture grew in scale and complexity leveraging that data became a challenge. It became more and more necessary to combine multiple messy data-sources in novel ways, in the right order and on a strict schedule... using distributed computing... with proper logging and error recovery... gosh. Batch jobs, cron, sticky tape and bits of string soon proved insufficient.

Enter Airflow.

Airflow is an Apache top-level project that was open-sourced by Airbnb. It's a seriously powerful tool thats all about defining, scheduling, running, monitoring and distributing complicated workflows.

In this talk I'll give you a bit of a tour of airflow's moving parts. I'll also talk a little bit about how we are leveraging Airflow at Umuzi.

Sheena O'Connell is very mysterious, mostly because she struggles to write about herself. She has primarily worked as a freelance software engineer and tech writer, and has worked in many different fields from gender equality, to fin-tech and lots of things in between. She is currently heading up Umuzi's web dev and data engineering department

We also have one last speaker, a former student of Umuzi, Makakole Mafane. He's done a bunch of work in their recruitment funnel. Many thousands of people apply to Umuzi for every intake. There are a lot of decisions that need to be made and it's just too much data to deal with manually. He has helped to automate parts of thier recruitment process through use of Python and Pandas, and he's helped to ensure clean input data by working on a new application portal using Django.

Cloudera will be on hand as well with some awesome swag to hand out.

Please come out and support an amazing academy and learn some new things along the way.

Food and drink will be provided.