2024 - 2026

Agentic Engineering for Data Scientists

Coming from a Software Engineering background, I saw that proficiency with development environments was a skill which my fellow data scientists sorely lacked. Most were still relying on Jupyter Lab. Back in 2024, it was obvious to me that this was a major bottleneck to the adoption of coding assistants.

I put together a group of VS Code power users, and led them in creating two full-day beginner and intermediate training courses. We then followed a "see one, do one, teach one" approach for recruiting additional champions across the business.

We organised workshops in all major offices around the globe, including US and India. We advocated for first class support by the internal platform team. We digitised the beginner course and made it available online for self study via video recordings. We also began the creation of an advanced course on Agentic Engineering.

By the time I left dunnhumby, most data scientists had switched to using VS Code on a daily basis and all had GitHub Copilot licenses.