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IMG Arena - A Grad's Odyssey

My recount of the IMG Arena Graduate Programme.

IMG Arena

IMG ARENA are a sports data company. We leverage the official sports data rights, network of data collectors, and technology to bring the world of sports data to fans. 

I could go a lot more into the various things we do as a company, but it would probably be best for you to visit our website: https://www.imgarena.com/ .

The Graduate Scheme

Today is the last day of IMG ARENA's (IMGA) first ever graduate programme, and what an programme it has been. A year of constant introductions, learning, doubt, and all sorts of experiences, has left me with a lot to debrief.

Let's begin with the programme structure:
The idea of the IMGA graduate scheme is to take talented, but inexperienced technologists and "place" them in specific areas of the business to learn and contribute to. After a while, we're moved to a completely different part of the business to repeat the process.

The next segments will be impressions of the placements I was rotated to.

NOTE: Seeing as I will be writing about my experiences, my wonderful colleagues will frequently be referenced, so I will be doing so by randomly selected initials.

Who's Scala? Never heard of her?

DDE | Tech Stack: Scala, AWS (EC2, RDS, ALB, NLB, SES), Ansible

Key Achievements:

- Atlassian Compass Automation Scripts

- EC2 Log-Stream config refactor 

- Onboard PostgresQL User DBs to Superset

I've always thought starting your first job would be a daunting task - meeting new people, learning their ways of working, learning about the business, and how you'll contribute to it. I've always thought starting to learn new languages to also be a daunting task - learning syntax, best-practices, reading documentation, and understanding the use cases. 

With my having very little experience writing any code in the Functional paradigm, let alone Scala, I braced myself for quite the ride. I was given ample time to bring myself up to speed with the tech stack, even getting to complete the "Functional Programming Principles in Scala" course provided by the EPFL on Coursera. This course, and the support of the more senior engineers of the team gave me the confidence to begin contributing to the teams' day-to-day, even if it was more centred around their platform migration (from the AWS technologies to the Kubernetes platform) rather than new features.

Arguably, a more important takeaway from this placement was a more complete understanding of the company itself. If the company were to be analogised as a human body, this team would be the Central Nervous System (CNS). Being the core data pipeline to route data from both external and internal sources, the other functions of the business were essentially clients of this team's product. I cannot thank DM and CG, a pair of long-standing engineers, who took time out of their day to answer my wide-reaching questions on their systems and the company as a whole.

I did feel however that the team lacked a more personal connection. With the team almost completely remote, I felt quite isolated. I did, however, take this opportunity to break out my shell and connect with other teams and colleagues with more office presence.

I (finally) got on base

DataOps | Tech Stack: Python, SQL, Druid, Kubernetes

The gif above was the base of the marketing pitch that the DataOps tech-lead, PG, gave the graduates.

As a fellow data scientist and lifelong sports fan, I felt completely welcomed and empowered by the team. The team's job was to take the data flowing through the DDE and derive sellable insights from them

Right off the bat, I was working on whole new features for the team, some key achievements were:

- A new suite of live aggregated stats endpoints for our live basketball data.

- Re-training one of our ML models using our own feature enriched historic golf database.

- "Golf course" aggregated stats radar chart

Semi-regular team meet-ups, "greenfield" project culture, interesting projects to work on, riveting discussions about sports and data, this placement was a blast! PG really enabled me to go and get my hands dirty, and was a great beacon of knowledge whenever I was losing my way.

I really didn't think I could enjoy a placement more than this one.