Watching my 2½-year-old son, Greyson, play in general, pick up things, and explore the world has reminded me of how curiosity is the engine of discovery. He sees things that most of us would not, like a single tiny ant crawling across the floor. That same curiosity brought all of us to AWS DeepRacer. Some of us jumped in because it’s a challenge, some because we’re interested in learning machine learning, and some because it’s a great way to learn by doing. I was in this for career and personal development.
In 2019, I started with the AWS DeepRacer Scholarship Challenge from Udacity. Through this DeepRacer experience, I learned about reinforcement learning within the field of machine learning. I was immediately hooked and became one of the community leaders in the DeepRacer space. AWS took notice of my support of the community, teaching new racers about Deepracing, and encouraged me to apply for the AWS Community Builders program. With every step up the ladder, this opportunity allowed me to uplevel my cloud knowledge and explore AWS services more intentionally. My crescendo was a new role in cloud-focused engineering.
Highlights were plentiful, such as commentating at Anthem’s AWS Summit and watching Nathan Liang one of the youngest in the league and not even out of high school break a world record. Still, our journey wasn’t just about watching others – I won two summits myself and had the surreal experience of breaking a world record at an AWS Summit race in DC. Only shortly after Chris Griffin beat my time at the London Summit taking the world record, But some of our greatest lessons came not from success, but from failure. Chris is a Senior Software Engineer from JPMC, and JP Morgan Chase seems to have some formula to make winners, what was so unfathomable to me at the time of my world record, was who I was racing against at the Summit. I was in for a shock during this time because who greeted me at the track that day was Sai Ram Naragoni the former champion from the 2021 season also known as JPMC-Rogue-Hyderabad. this was nerve-wracking going against a former champion leading by 3-tenths of the second until the first place was confirmed which I felt was impossible to hold, but this was the beauty of this competitive competition win or lose was sometimes on the razer’s edge.
The most difficult moment of that year came on the first day of the Reinvent 2023 championships. I had to swallow that bitter taste of elimination in round 1 partly because of the racing format. I knew this day would be hard because we’re the world’s best at this point. However, I knew it wasn’t over and started training preparing for my Last chance race. There was hope I could get back into the top 32, but even if I lost; I still had something to be proud of because one of the top 32 was a student I had mentored in the Student League which was Patelaniket. In his first year transitioning from Student League to Deepracer League, he got to the top 32. I fought back in the Wild Card Last Chance Race and won one of only two slots available. I was positive about my victory here because only a few racers left to attempt their last chance. I climbed to 6th place in the top 8 from an early elimination. That moment was even sweeter because of the huge obstacles I had to overcome.
And to be honest, I look back on DeepRacer now and realize that it wasn’t really about the races, or even about winning or setting records. It was about the experience – dealing with the difficulties, persevering through the failures, growing through the journey. The program sparked a desire to learn, a curiosity to keep experimenting and improving, a motivation to push the boundaries, and a belief that the small adjustments, the model failures, and the breakthroughs are worth it.
As the DeepRacer League draws to a close, I feel like we’re closing a chapter. But the values it’s taught us – curiosity, resilience, continuous learning – will outlast it by a long shot. We didn’t just learn about machine learning – we learned how to approach things with a clear head, an open mind, and a desire to learn. And even as one round of this adventure comes to an end, the spirit of discovery lives on. The real victory is not in any given feat of learning – but in the growth that curiosity fosters and the thrill of knowing there’s always something new to try.
Daniel, this was a great read—thank you so much for writing this and placing a nice capstone on something that many truly considered a sport. In the 2023 Summit in DC, I learned so much from you about strategy—a focus on simplicity, reviewing and labeling your logs, etc. Your generosity in knowledge sharing while we were waiting between runs is something I will remember. Cheers to you for your wins!