Hello Stitch Fix followers, check out where our fellow Stitch Fixers are speaking in the month of May.

Virtual

Stefan Krawczyk, will be at Kafka Summit Europe 2021 on May 12th presenting on Enabling Data Scientists to easily create and own Kafka Consumers.

Description:

At Stitch Fix, we hire Full Stack Data Scientists (145+) and expect them to perform diverse functions: from conception to modeling to implementation to measurement. Since Kafka is the way we get event data, this inevitably means that a Data Scientist will need to write a Kafka consumer if they’re going to complete their implementation work. E.g. to transform some client data into features, or perform a model prediction, or allocate someone to an A/B test, etc. In this talk I’ll go over how we built an opinionated Kafka client to easily enable Data Scientists to deploy and own production Kafka consumers, by focusing on writing python functions rather than fighting pitfalls with Kafka.

Neelesh Salian, will be at Data and AI summit on May 27th presenting on Modularized ETL Writing with Apache Spark.

Description:

Apache Spark has been an integral part of Stitch Fix’s compute infrastructure. Over the past five years, it has become our de facto standard for most ETL and heavy data processing needs and expanded our capabilities in the Data Warehouse. Since all our writes to the Data Warehouse are through Apache Spark, we took advantage of that to add more modules that supplement ETL writing. Config driven and purposeful, these modules perform tasks onto a Spark Dataframe meant for a destination Hive table. These are organized as a sequence of transformations on the Apache Spark dataframe prior to being written to the table.These include a process of journalizing. It is a process which helps maintain a non-duplicated historical record of mutable data associated with different parts of our business. Data quality, another such module, is enabled on the fly using Apache Spark. Using Apache Spark we calculate metrics and have an adjacent service to help run quality tests for a table on the incoming data. And finally, we cleanse data based on provided configurations, validate and write data into the warehouse. We have an internal versioning strategy in the Data Warehouse that allows us to know the difference between new and old data for a table. Having these modules at the time of writing data allows cleaning, validation and testing of data prior to entering the Data Warehouse thus relieving us, programmatically, of most of the data problems. This talk focuses on ETL writing in Stitch Fix and describes these modules that help our Data Scientists on a daily basis.

Elijah ben Izzy, will also be at Data and AI summit on May 28th presenting on The function, the context, and the data – building an abstraction for simpler ML ops at Stitch Fix.

Description:

Autonomy and ownership are core to working at Stitch Fix, particularly on the Algorithms team. We enable data scientists to deploy and operate their models independently, with minimal need for handoffs or gatekeeping. By writing a simple function and calling out to an intuitive API, data scientists can harness a suite of platform-provided tooling meant to make ML operations easy. In this talk, we will dive into the abstractions the Data Platform team has built to enable this. We will go over the interface data scientists use to specify a model and what that hooks into, including online deployment, batch execution on Spark, and metrics tracking and visualization.

Be sure to catch us at these events :)