if you want to be successful you're ngmi
tldr; you need to do what you love with integrity and be successful as side effect. I don't say this, Seneca does
I've been asked many times about how I built an audience, by many people who actually miss the point.
I've been building in public since covid, started around 2020. This consisted of showing up in online/last in-person meetups to present an open-source lib I like for an e2e workshop on how to use it, or actually contributing to some open-source libs (I started very small), writing deep learning visualizations. I loved learning from papers and books (like deeplearningbook.org) and distill them to a visualized understanding and do my best in my free time to carry it to others, it helped me learn better and helped others too.
https://merveenoyan.medium.com/complete-guide-on-deep-learning-architectures-chapter-1-on-convnets-1d3e8086978d
It evolved to doing algorithm whiteboards for deep learning or data structures & algos, or we'd code a data structure (these are on Turkish unfortunately), I'd show how to build models using tensorflow (I'm old), coding on twitch on topics I learned on my own or during master's. This is roughly 6 years ago.
I recently made these public for the sake of nostalgia https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_76Qi-0_W81DD6sdYN7HRA
Sometimes I would be sick and think of cancelling the twitch streams and my then partner would say "you don't owe anything to anyone, it's ok", but I genuinely loved teaching so I would keep doing it.
As the byproduct of all of this people started following, ML was a niche back then (it was the time when MLOps was booming). To be frank for a long time, if someone asked me whether I'd want to have audience or not I would say no, people wrote bad things about me online, which my mom would read and I would be annoyed due to that. I didn't care because I don't do anything to hurt anyone, if someone doesn't have anything to learn from what I have to say, they could unsubscribe/block, if they want to hurt me, it's on them.
It went on like this until I started working at HF. On top of serving a higher purpose which I'm aligned with, HF is a company where every single engineer has written a blog post at least once during their career because we work on open-source and we value education a lot and unless you talk about what you build, no one will use it. So I think me and the company are match-made, I love to contribute to open-source and I love to talk/illustrate what I build. I also chose to write the book not because of money (spending almost every weekend entire year is definitely not worth it, add on top the amount of work I do at work during week) but because I was working on a niche (VLMs) in different ways, VLM alignment, VLMs in agents, pure computer vision etc which people don't know how to work with, so I just wanted to build this to serve people.
I was never growth hacker or anything in this sense because I'd still do all of this for an audience of five people (even better if they learn well than a thousand). I am not selling virtue because I'm financially alright and I don't know what future brings and it would be very easy to do so. In the way my family raised me though, I need to stay integral or I feel like bad things will follow (on top of feeling moral account of it). I get asked constantly about paid ads, I have never taken one and I constantly refuse. If you have an open-source library or model I'm excited about, I'll support you for free. I think when people trust you you have to stay true to them. This trust was also built as a byproduct, so appreciate this. In this regard, I also want to stay true to my own values and many companies do not match that, so you can see me having based takes here and there burning bridges of me potentially working for them (I do not want to!).
I wrote this piece because this week I was recognized at my favorite bar by a fellow machine learning engineer who told me they ordered my book (I had this in Turkey but never in Paris!), and I somehow made it to my favorite youtube channel (Fireship, video here) and everyone pinged me for it and made fun of me (positively) saying I'm famous now. This was never the goal itself but if I can get trust of people and if I can live up to the trust as a byproduct of doing what I love, I'll just be content. I probably would have never imagined any of these along with many other things like meeting my heroes in field, but I never truly wanted it. Here's what Seneca says about that.
"Glory is the shadow of virtue." Letter 79.13
Why I love this: A shadow cannot exist on its own; it requires a physical body blocking the sun. Virtue (loving the craft, mastering oneself) is the body, and glory (recognition, success) is merely the shadow cast by that body. If you try to grab a shadow on the ground, you capture nothing.
We live like we have endless amount of time on our hands, climbing over wrong hills and optimizing for others' gazes, so it's a reminder to do what you love religiously, staying true to yourself and others in the process and let the good things come to you. One last thing on shortness of time:
"Review in your mind how much of your time has been spent on an unpaid creditor, how much on a mistress, how much on a king, how much on a client, how much in wrangling with your wife, how much in running about the city on duties, add too the time that has been unused; you will see that you have fewer years to your credit than you count."
He ends with "how little of your own was left to you: you will realize that you are dying before your time." You have no time left.
If you read until here, many thanks! I hope this finds you well.