Max Woolf

"Data" has become a modern buzzword. Data presentation and analysis, often including the terms big data/machine learning/deep learning, has become a popular tool for clickbait shenanigans. Since the data and methodology is rarely included with these types of content, it is impossible for others to verify the conclusions and learn from the data. 

I intend to change that, and make data science/ML/AI more accessible and democratic. 

All my data and code for getting the data, processing the data, and visualizing the data, is open source for anyone to reference and improve upon. With Patreon funding, I will be able to take the my data analysis and AI tooling to the next level, and do some really crazy-yet-cool things. 

About Me 

I'm Max Woolf, a Data Scientist at BuzzFeed. In the many years since moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, I've written many, many blog posts on my personal blog, <a href="http://minimaxir.com/" target="_blank">minimaxir</a>, and posted many open-source code repositories on <a href="https://github.com/minimaxir" target="_blank">GitHub</a> with hundreds of Stars. 

Why I Am On Patreon Open-sourcing data visualizations and AI tooling has unexpected disadvantages. Many data/ML tool creators 

don't open source their code or models, which increases the mystery/marketing appeal of the tools and cascades to conference engagements, books, and other revenue opportunities. Without that hook, I am at disadvantage at generating the money needed to continue my work. Additionally, open-sourcing tooling takes additional development time to ensure code is reproducible on a variety of systems and ML models behave correctly on a wide variety of datasets. 

Even though I am able to keep the cost of production down significantly through clever engineering and DevOps (which I also open source!), the costs of running large data analyses and apps are non-zero, and can in fact be very expensive when machine-learning with GPUs and hosting ML-based APIs in the cloud. 

The goal of this Patreon is to subsidize the costs of development, but the more money I receive on Patreon, the greater the projects I can accomplish.

Recent posts by Max Woolf