Jesper Dramsch , , read in 5 minutes contains affiliate links

It’s the end of 2021.

Finishing out a year is a great invitation to perform a review of what worked and what didn’t. Obviously, significantly expanding on this website and sharing more and more of my accomplishments, experiences, thoughts, and insights has been a huge step.

Let’s look at some events and numbers!

The Big (Personal) Events of 2021

Hard to believe that happened this year, but I did finish my PhD.

It’s very nice to have that chapter closed and the piece of paper and title. I did publish all software that lead to papers as open source and most papers, even the book chapter in Advances in Geophysics are available on Arxiv. Find all of Jesper Dramsch’ PhD here.

I also published my entire defence on Youtube. Is it insanity? Is it openness? Probably both.


New Job at ECMWF

Mid-2021 I accepted a new position as Scientist for Machine Learning at the ECMWF.

I feel very lucky to have made it through this hiring process I think. The work is a learning curve for sure, but it’s very fulfilling. I would’ve never imagined working in meteorology instead of oil & gas, so this is a huge personal development.

Can’t wait to see where this is going!

Social Media

On Twitter, I have been experimenting with threads and the atomic essay format from ship 30 for 30. This has propelled my total follower count to 2000, the highest it has ever been.

Writing regularly on Linkedin has had a similar effect with over 4600 followers there. The atomic essays were well received there as well, but links to my blog posts did the best. I assume it’s due to the awkward cropping of the essays.

This year I have been trying out Polywork which has been fun so far. I did get the verification badge over there, which was a nice gesture!

Content Creation

Video Creation

My Youtube has reached over 880 subscribers total with 15,000 visitors and over 1200h watch time. Considering that I only published 9 videos, I think this is a tremendous success.

The most popular video was a nice overview about buying laptops for machine learning:


Runner Ups:

On Skillshare, I taught over 2500 students. I have only published two courses this year, which I hope to increase next year. Combined with the significant milestone of surpassing 100,000 watch time minutes, teaching video courses on data science has truly been a success.

Writing

My Newsletter “Late to the Party 🎉 has grown to over 200 active subscribers. In total, I have sent out 45 Newsletters and gained 200 Subscribers. As for the vanity metrics, my newsletters have been opened 4500 times and subscribers have visited 1300 links. That is mind-boggling and I’m still having tons of fun sending these curated links and updates out weekly.

I have completely overhauled the back-end of this website and migrated to Nikola. This enabled me to introduce new pages, like the books, speaker, or research pages. Additionally, this has opened up space to create this blog.

In total, this small website had 4100 Visitors to 58 articles I wrote this year. Frankly a number I was surprised by myself. I really tried to write interesting things this year and overall it seemed to resonate. My article about recreating Hey.com in Gmail was posted to Hackernews and has thus become the most popular article I have written:

Most popular posts:

Seeing as those are my main content pillars Machine Learning, Python, and Careers, I’d say that is pretty great!

Giveaway

The [machine learning giveaway](/giveaway-2022 I organized earlier this year was a huge success in my book. We had 3712 entries from all over the world. I ended up sending physical prizes to:

  • Nigeria
  • United Kingdom
  • Germany
  • USA

Figuring that out was kinda fun, kinda terrifying.

Professional Milestones

My Google Scholar says that I reached an h-index of 6 a total of 198(ish) citations. As we all know, Scholar isn’t the most accurate, but generally, it’s a great trajectory.

I had some public speaking milestones. I held my first keynote about what science can learn from self-driving cars. I was invited to hold a guest lecture in the Geophysical Seminar at my Alma Mater University of Hamburg.

Finally, I also managed to present a talk at Pydata Global again, making the “How to guarantee”-machine learning talks the beginning of a series. Maybe. The tongue in cheek tone of complicated topics has really resonated with people so far.

Conclusion

It has been a great year of 2021.

I, like many others, have struggled with Zoom Fatigue, worked through the Great Resignation and all the things that come with the second year of an ongoing pandemic.

I can’t wait to be less productive due to meeting up with more people again. In the distant future. Hopefully. We'll see.

Until then, I'll keep on keeping on. This has been fun!