Thanks for joining us at "Ditch the Anxiety, Make Bold Moves, and Design Your Meaningful Tech Career"
Plus, help a Charlottesville start-up, free book give-aways, and lots of upcoming events
Thanks again to everyone who attended our Charlottesville Data Science event on Wednesday! Seasoned data science leader and career coach Kim Scott provided an unvarnished look at the highs and lows of her own career path and shared practical tools, frameworks, and mindset shifts technology professionals can use to stay calm, collected, and able to direct their energy to what really matters.
The slides from Kim’s talk are now available here:
If you’d like to follow up with Kim about any of the themes she discussed in her talk, she’d love to hear your feedback! You can reach her:
On LinkedIn
Via email at kim@refactorandthrive.com
Crowd-Sourced Recommendations from Ditch the Anxiety
After Kim’s talk, we had a wonderful discussion in which many audience members shared tips for books, apps, services, and other resources they’ve found useful in their own lives. We thought it would be helpful to collect these recommendations together in one place for community members to review. Check them out here. The document is editable, so feel free to add your own!
Help a Charlottesville startup and get a $20 Amazon gift card
Know Your Developer (KYD) is a Charlottesville-based startup working to restore trust in technical hiring. It provides a way to turn your public work, like GitHub, software packages, publications, and social profiles, into a private, portable, provable profile you can share with employers or collaborators.
As a perk for the Charlottesville Data Science community, anyone who submits a KYD Self-Check Report with two or more connected sources and emails Milanie Cleere (mcleere@knowyourdeveloper.ai) by Wednesday, November 19 (11:59 PM ET) will receive a $20 Amazon gift card. Use code KYDDEV2 at knowyourdeveloper.ai to run your report free.
Thanks again to Know Your Developer for supporting both our October and November events!
Vault Virginia Open House
You probably know that Vault Virginia hosts many Charlottesville Data Science events free of charge — a huge service to our community. Ever wonder what else goes on in this historic building?
On Saturday, November 15, Vault Virginia invites the public to explore its vibrant ecosystem of artists, entrepreneurs, and local partners shaping the Charlottesville community. The day-long celebration will feature experiences and openings throughout the building, including Vault Virginia, The Bradbury Café, Bill Atwood Art, Three Wrong Turns, Friends of Cville, and the launch of CreatorHub, a new membership-based workspace for local creators. The open house will be followed by an evening ticketed concert at The Guild, Charlottesville’s newest venue and intimate listening room experience, featuring an acoustic reunion by Virginia’s own Everything.
Hit the link below for more details!
Build a Career in Data Science Book Give-Away
Congratulations to Jeremy, Mark, Terry, and Jordan, all of whom won a free copy of the e-book version of Build a Career in Data Science, courtesy of Manning Publications! Everyone who entered to win also received a discount code for 45% off any purchases from the Manning website.
We’re going to do more free book give-aways like this in the future!
More upcoming events around Charlottesville
Tonight & Tomorrow: beCamp 2025, Charlottesville’s long-running annual “unconference” for technologists, creatives, and builders, will take place at the Looking Glass Art Bar (Friday evening) and Studio IX (Saturday). It’s entirely community-driven — no preset agenda, no panels, no keynotes. On Friday night, participants pitch and vote on ideas for sessions, then spend Saturday diving into the conference schedule they’ve created together. beCamp is free to attend, but advance registration is required.
Thursday, November 20: The Charlottesville Rust Meetup will host an online meetup focused on Tock, an open-source, Rust-based operating system used to run multiple concurrent, mutually distrustful applications on embedded platforms, from security processors to automotive systems.
Monday, December 1: The Call for Proposals for speakers at the 2026 RVATech Data & AI Summit closes. It would be great to see members of the Charlottesville Data Science community on stage in Richmond!
Wednesday, December 3: Join Charlottesville Data Science for our December event, Forecasting Disease Outbreaks: Data Science for Epidemiology. In this double-feature, Aniruddha Adiga, a Research Assistant Professor at the UVA Biocomplexity Institute, and VP Nagraj, a practicing data scientist and Ph.D. candidate at the UVA School of Data Science, will discuss the evolving methods, data sources, and technical infrastructure shaping how we predict and respond to infectious disease outbreaks. We’ll be gathering in person at the UVA School of Data Science.
Friday, December 5: The UVA Conference on Ethical AI in Business will explore the opportunities and challenges presented by the rapid adoption of AI in many types of businesses across the economy. Hosted at The Forum Hotel by the UVA Darden School of Business and organized by the LaCross AI Institute, this event brings together leading researchers and business experts to share research-grounded insights, real-world case studies, and ethical frameworks for AI adoption. One of the featured speakers is Peter McCrory, currently the Head of Economics at Anthropic.
Tuesday, December 9: Cville AI Explorers will host their December meeting, featuring the talk Tuning the Tuners: Building a Multi-Agent System for Search Relevance Optimization from Eric Pugh. Eric is a co-founder of OpenSource Connections, a Charlottesville-based search & AI consulting firm, and shapes the technical direction of the OpenSearch project.