[mlpack] NumFOCUS summit report and ideas

[Marcus Edel]

About the informal weekly meeting, should we schedule something, maybe for the end of the week?

> On 8. Nov 2019, at 00:10, Ryan Curtin <ryan at ratml.org> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Nov 07, 2019 at 01:37:16PM -0500, Marcus Edel wrote:
>> Hello,
>> 
>>> mlpack video meetings:
>> 
>> What about we create a shared document (e.g. google docs) and use that to manage
>> the meetings, if someone has a particular question or topic they like to discuss
>> they can write it down before the meeting. This allows us to prepare for certain
>> topics. We can also keep track of what was discussed in the meetings.
> 
> That sounds good to me if you want to set it up; alternately we can just
> send an email to the list beforehand and people could respond to it with
> ideas.  Either is fine honestly.
> 
>>> giving talks on mlpack:
>>> 
>>> mlpack talks/workshops - this is a very good point. I've been doing some of this
>>> and it really pays off. The amount of user conversion you get by doing this is
>>> superior to opportunistic discoveries of the library. And I truly believe we
>>> need more users and more engagement. After all, that's why we build mlpack,
>>> right? I would add that we also need talks and workshops that are *not* super
>>> technical. For new users (consumers of the library I mean), metaprogramming is
>>> not really attractive. Instead, these users are looking forward a
>>> simple-useful-easy "Hello World" that delivers instantaneous value. Take a look
>>> at scikit-learn for instance, it's all about examples and ready to consume
>>> snippets.
>> 
>> Agreed, maybe we can put a list together with events (local/global) as a
>> starting point.
> 
> Sounds good---I'll see if I can compile a list of events I'm interested
> in in the near future and we can share it here or somewhere.
> 
>>> C++ notebooks:
>> 
>> I have a setup running that I can make accessible, Sylvain used Binder, which
>> has some limitations like 1-2GB of memory, kernel shutdown after 10 minutes of
>> inactivity. If I'm thinking about running neural network examples, we might run
>> into the mentioned limitations.
> 
> Sounds good---we can also use some of mlpack.org's resources for this,
> and NumFOCUS might be able to help with the resources also via
> connections to large companies or something?  I'm not sure.
> 
> -- 
> Ryan Curtin    | "Wha' happened?"
> ryan at ratml.org |   - Mike LaFontaine