How a camera, a raspberry pi, a former engineer, an LLM, and some nasty nasty squirrels worked together to build the ultimate squirrel defense system.

A guided tour of building an AI-driven squirrel detector that will attempt to deter squirrels from stealing bird seed from bird feeders (Narrator: It didn't keep the squirrels away). I'll walk through how I worked with an LLM to rubber duck implementation and installation ideas. I'll talk about how I fine tuned an existing lightweight model to focus on recognizing squirrels. And, I'll describe the actual squirrel deterrent mechanism. While I expect this to be heavy on technical details, I'm here for calling out my failures along the way. Let's have fun commiserating about persistent squirrels.

Transitioning into management comes with a set of challenges that aren’t always obvious at the start. This talk outlines what new managers should expect across three core areas: managing teams, managing individuals, and managing yourself. We’ll discuss how to navigate the nuances of these areas to help you be a successful manager.

We’ll explore issues such as lack of team vision, neglecting leadership development, and hesitating to ask basic questions. We’ll also reflect on the pressures of being a manager and how that can affect your own performance.

Throughout the session, we’ll share real examples of mistakes we made early in our management careers, how we addressed them, and what we learned in the process. We’ve made these mistakes, so you don’t have to.