About Jan
Hi 👋
My name is Jan Meppe and it is my mission to change the way that people learn.
To work on that mission I currently work at Snappet, an edtech startup where I’m leading the machine learning platform infrastructure team.
Before that, I worked as a data science consultant for the global IT consulting firm Cognizant.
Interested in working with me? View my resume here.
💡 New here? Go to Start Here to view a curated list of my favourite posts organised by theme!
I love building and scaling machine learning systems in Python and AWS and in my spare time I’m learning a bit of Rust.
I am interested in and hence write about the following four things:
- Machine learning system design: How do we design and build great (machine learning) systems?
- Software: How do we build great software?
- Learning: How do we learn and get better at learning?
- Product: How do we build great digital products?
Next to that, my blog is a collection of short personal rants and sometimes informative how-to guides, so feel free to browse around!
Otherwise you can also browse by tag, browse the grid, view the archive, or search in the top right.
I wrote some popular tech blog articles
Three popular (>20.000 reads) blogs that I wrote are:
- Regex For Noobs (like me!) - An Illustrated Guide
- How to add a new kernel to your Jupyter Notebook
- How to set Python 3 as default on Mac
I am passionate about writing good software
And I love writing about it:
I love data-driven decision making
I believe that machine learning is just one expression of data-driven decision making:
- I used data-driven decision making to become one of the best 500 players in Europe in a game called Overwatch (that’s the 0.0012%th percentile performance)
- I used data-driven decision making to learn how to solve a Rubik’s cube in under 15 seconds
- I used data-driven decision making to reduce a client’s CI/CD build times by a factor 3x resulting in significant cost savings
I make tiny tutorials about AWS infrastructure
- How to deploy an AWS Lambda serverless function using AWS CloudFormation
- Building a REST API with AWS API Gateway and AWS Lambda in Python
- Automating cloud infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code
- Deploying your first AWS CloudFormation stack
I write about things that interest me
I write because I like it and because writing can help people at scale:
- Janmeppe.com hosts 50+ of my blog posts
- Today Jan Learned contains 100+ editions of my now discontinued daily newsletter
- Hacker News featured one of my blog posts on their front page and was read more than 30.000 times.
I made an iOS app in the past!
I built an iPhone app that was live on the app store and wrote about what I learned:
- View 3 good things: a gratitude log on the App store
- Simple React Native Redux counter example
- How to add a bottom modal in React Native
I write about how to set up a blog like this
I share what I learn setting up this Jekyll blog with the Minimal Mistakes theme:
- How to remove the excerpt from recent posts in a minimal mistakes blog
- How to change size of blog posts
- How to add a favicon to minimal mistakes
- How to add Latex to Minimal Mistakes
- How to change Jekyll theme to Minimal Mistakes
- How to add a teaser image to minimal mistakes
- How to add a splash image to minimal mistakes
- How to change the font size of the code blocks in minimal mistakes using Github pages
I studied here
I studied econometrics (financial engineering) with a focus on machine learning:
- MPhil in (Advanced) Econometrics from the Tinbergen Institute
- MSc in Econometrics from the University of Amsterdam
- BSc in Econometrics from the University of Amsterdam
I hang around here
- Tweet me on Twitter
- Ping me in a PR on Github
- Slide in my DMs on Instagram
- Email me on
{first_name}{last_name}@gmail.com- I love sending emails to people with personal blogs, so I also love getting emails from people that read my stuff!
