Transformation of the Week
Christos Magganas

Transcript

Lusk: Hey, Christos, thanks for joining me today. Congratulations on winning the Transformation Of The Week. Tell us a little bit more about your background.

Christos: Absolutely, thanks Chris. I have an actuarial science bachelor’s from the University of Santa Barbara, that’s financial math and statistics. The last four years learning machine learning and then in the last two years learning generative AI as Chat GPT emerged.

Lusk: Tell me a little bit more about your journey into Gen AI.

Christos: My initial spark was my automation success using Virtual Basic on the job to save time and reduce stress. Now I’m a founding engineer doing conversational AI work with SMBs, involved with my family’s property management business and interested in using prop tech.

That whole journey of self-education, upskilling, learning emerging technologies, doing the Machine Learning Engineering Bootcamp was really transformative. Particularly for me, I think the generative coding is the most exciting and valuable tool doing all these automations for myself.

Recently I spoke at GitHub about generative coding and kind of best practices. So I’d say like right now that’s what I’m most excited about.

Lusk: Now, you were one of our first graduates. You graduated from the LLM Ops course, the very first one that we ever did. And then you served as a peer supporter for the very first bootcamp that we did. Have you been able to put anything that you’ve learned into practice, whether it’s personally or professionally?

Christos: Yeah, definitely. Some of the RAG applications and LLM development knowledge that I learned from AI Makerspace both the ops and engineering courses. Personalized Study Cards, was one startups I helped.

A project we called Jarvis, which was kind of a voice RAG for manufacturing. And currently working on a SMS food ordering application and using conversational AI knowledge that I’ve learned as well as coding generation best practices that I was talking about earlier.

Lusk: So you’ve been building shipping and sharing like a legend! And I know you’ve been on some hackathons lately, tell me a little bit more about those.

Christos: The one with AI Makerspace and LlamaIndex, The Rag-a-thon down in Palo Alto that happened recently. This year was quite exciting because I not only got the opportunity to participate and, win some awards, presenting some cool projects, and doing another one of my own. But also working with, AI Makerspace team, which is just so engaged with the community. Connecting with all the sponsors at that event was really exciting. And I think it all came from building, shipping and sharing and people seeing that. And then it just being sort of an iterative loop.

And since then building my brand kind of posting, finding my voice going to more hackathons like I did this past weekend. The Voice and Video hackathon, I think we got a Best Tool Use award as well. And that experience was was again, just another opportunity to connect with the community.

Lusk: What words of wisdom do you have for someone who’s out there watching this right now, considering moving into Gen AI?

Christos: To not do it alone. I think community is really important. They are going to help you keep up with what is quite literally too much information that’s out there to kind of make sense of it. If you want a structured course, they have the AI Engineering Bootcamp. I took it, I personally recommend it. It was a game changer for my career.

You can go into the community Discord where you can get even more resources. People are having discussions, it’s a thriving community. If I have any questions, I can ask it and somebody will surely answer it right away.

Lusk: Well, congratulations again, Christos, for winning this week’s Transformation Of The Week. Tell people how they can connect and engage with you.

Christos: Thanks, Chris. Happy to build, ship and share and it’s an honor to be chosen for this week’s Transformation Of The Week. If anyone wants to connect with me or follow my journey, they can check me out on LinkedIn, I’m posting regularly. I want to connect with people in generative AI. I want to learn, I want to share.

So if you have a Gen AI use-case that you need help solving or implementing, please don’t hesitate, you can reach out to me for consultation.