Sometimes we forget the humans behind the tech in our ever busy world. DSF is fortunate enough to know some incredible tech leaders across the world and has the privilege of hearing them present at our events. That being said, our Speaker Spotlight sets the stage to get to know our speakers on a more personal level and connect them with our growing community. Read the mini interview below!

A bit about Faye:

Faye is an AWS Community Hero and Principal Training Architect at Pluralsight who specialises in helping organisations and individuals to develop their AWS skills so that they can confidently and efficiently drive cloud transformation initiatives.

She has previously worked on a consultancy basis as a Principal Infrastructure Architect, designing IT systems for the financial services industry, working with clients like New York Stock Exchange, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Visa, Standard Chartered Bank, IHS Markit, and many more.

How did you start out in your tech career?

Like many people, I began my career working with physical servers in corporate data centres. I started out as a systems administrator, supporting mission critical systems and then progressed into a solutions architect role, designing IT systems for a range of clients the financial services industry. I worked as a contractor for around 10 years, which enabled me to gain a lot of experience with a variety of different projects in a relatively short space of time. After that I was asked to consider a role in online teaching, which sounded interesting because it was an opportunity to share what I’d learned over the years, and also to dive deeper into some of the technologies that interest me, like cloud computing, AI and machine learning.

What are the signs of success in your field?

I think success is a very personal thing, and we all need to define what that means for ourselves. We live in a world where we get feedback all the time now, from strangers on the internet, to customers and colleagues all around the world. Being recognised for doing a good job, helping people, and being seen as approachable are all signs of success that are important to me. For me to hear from customers that I’ve helped them to learn something new, or opened their eyes to a new career path, that to me is success. But also getting to the stage in my career where I have  autonomy and freedom to direct what I work on is also an important sign of success, being trusted to know what is right, and being listened to.  Recieving awards is also wonderful, can open doors and signify success, but ultimately it’s the feedback that you get on a daily and weekly basis that shapes the way you feel about how well you’re doing!

What is the best and worst thing about your job role?

The best thing is definitely getting to work with the latest technology, in my role it’s important to keep up to date with the latest releases from AWS, and there’s always something exciting happening.

The worst thing about it is that you never feel like you’re done. There’s always something to do, and it can be difficult to switch off.

What can you advise someone just starting out to be successful?

Learn all the things!  A career in tech is a lifelong commitment to learning, so get used to it. There are so many ways to learn now, so many free resources. When you do learn something new, you can write an article about it and share it with others, that way you solidify your learning and you begin to establish yourself as an expert in a topic.

How do you switch off?

I run most days and do yoga every day, I also love baking. Anything that takes me away from looking at a screen!

What advice would you give your younger self?

I would tell my younger self that all the difficult projects are the ones that teach you the most! When things work out the first time you don’t think too much about why that happened, so what you learn from that experience is limited.  But when you need to troubleshoot something, figure out what went wrong and why, that’s when you learn, so don’t be afraid of things going wrong, it will all work out in the end!

What is next for you?

Career wise, I have a new course that I’m working on, to help people prepare for the AWS Machine Learning Engineer Associate certification exam. So over the coming weeks I’m working on getting that ready, I also have some speaking opportunities at AWS re:Invent which is the biggest cloud conference of the year, with around 60,000 attendees!

 

If you could do anything now, what would you do? Why?

I’ve talked a lot about my career so I’ll give you a couple of personal goals for this 2025: Firstly I’m planning a trip to Mauritius with my husband, we love hiking, climbing mountains, and being in nature, so we are having a lot of fun planning that trip.

I’m also working on a project to create a digital twin of myself using Large Language Models, it’s just a fun exercise to get more familiar with some of the AI technologies I haven’t used before.

What are your top 5 predictions in tech for the next 5 years?

1) AI Sustainability Initiatives 

We’ve heard a lot about the ethics of AI recently and guardrails preventing certain content being input to models, but what about guardrails that help to prevent workloads that are unnecessarily wasteful? I would love to see AI models refuse to complete tasks that could be completed more sustainably and cost effectively using a different mechanism. Over the next 5 years I hope that sustainability is going to be a big part of the discussion about ethical and responsible AI.

2) The rise of SLMs (Small Language Models)

Small language models that run on personal devices like smartphones, tablets, laptops and other home devices will enable these devices to deliver AI experiences without relying on large remote servers. I think that is very exciting, and could also help with data privacy concerns.

3) Increased Appreciation of Human-centric Soft Skills

In a world where AI can perform some tasks better than humans, the value of skills that only humans can perform will rise exponentially. I’m talking about skills like communication, empathy, leadership, creativity, and establishing a human connection. People who have developed skills in these areas will be in a great position to succeed.

4) Data Overload!

I feel like we are already heading towards an over-proliferation of data. Do tech giants have a responsibility to help customers to properly manage the amount of data that they store? Instead of encouraging us to keep storing more data, duplicating and backing up data that might not even be useful, I would like to see tech companies like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud contributing to helping the world identify and eliminate surplus data that has no value. Helping with deduplication and compression to reduce the amount of data we are mindlessly generating and storing, and identifying data that is useless or factually incorrect. I hope that tech companies will release services that help with all of this, so we can stop servicing all this unnecessary data, save money and conserve the planet’s resources.

5) Tech Gives Back

Tech already creates a lot of problems for humanity. AI is in a great position to be able to help solve world problems, like climate change, world health issues, poverty and social inequality. I would love to see big tech giants contribute in these areas, rather than the creation of more billionaires! At some point the tech industry will need to give something back. I’m optimistic that some of these problems can be solved!

 

Watch Faye’s session with the Data Science Festival here.

Thank you to all our wonderful speakers for taking part in our Speaker Spotlight!

Want to become a DSF Speaker? Apply here!