You are what you read: Building a personal internet front-page with spaCy and Prodigy

Sometimes the internet can be a bit overwhelming, so I thought I would make a tool to create a personalized summary of it! In this talk, I'll demonstrate an open-source front-page project that allows me to filter info on the internet on a certain topic, customized and adapted to the user's preference.

While building this project, I have been able to further explore the open-source NLP library, spaCy, and the scriptable annotation tool, Prodigy. Part of this talk will discuss how this project was implemented with regard to data collection, annotation and modeling. I developed a custom annotation interface, created a spaCy NLP pipeline, and explored different model architectures.

Through the project, I learned about the power of working with tools that offer both good guide-rails and extensive customizability. In this talk, we'll also look at the design concepts of spaCy and Prodigy and how they've enhanced the developer experience for different types of projects, including my personal front-page. I'll discuss what I've discovered about how customizable tooling can improve the developer experience when building complex and adaptable software.