The other day I gave a talk on doing machine learning in production. It was a short talk at a local meetup, and I felt like trying something new. Instead of making slides, I wrote a short 8-page zine illustrating some concepts about machine learning, printed 70 copies on my home printer (who has an awesome long-arm swingline stapler? I DO!!!), and gave them out to everyone who came!

There are 2 versions of it, as usual:

• a version you can read on your computer
• a version you can print and staple and fold

If you like it, you should read the PDF that it’s based on: Rules of Machine Learning: Best Practices for ML Engineering, which I found out about thanks to Avi Bryant.

I learned that:

• giving a talk without using slides at all is possible. It was a little weird, but I will probably experiment with it again in the future. I still like using slides though!
• I can write a short, sketchy zine in 2 hours (which is the same amount of time it takes me to write similar-quality slides!)
• I can print, staple, and fold 70 zines in 40 minutes (with some folding help from my amazing partner Kamal :))
• giving away zines at a meetup is really fun, way more fun than being like “uh, the slides are on my website”

Here’s the cover: