I came across Erik around the middle of my CS degree and since then his blog posts and talks have been major 'passive mentoring' for me.
I really admire what he's acheived so far in his career and I also really like the way he approaches software development. He's successfully straddled the Data Engineering <-> ML divide, something I've been trying to do myself.
His ideas about growth companies and personal human capital have also been influential. Part of the reason I turned down a Senior position paying more money to go in as a grad at a growing unicorn was his advice.
Also good to see him still reinforcing Stats as underrated. I just applied to go into a short graduate program in Maths & Stats because I'm not got enough at it to be an ML Engineer.
