I was rummaging through Kaggle Crackers channel at Open Data Science slack when I saw post from Vadim, who recently turned 17. Things he achieved impressed me and I decided to bring them here

Unfortunately, this year has been the toughest of my life and the lives of all Ukrainians, but that doesn't mean we should just give up and do nothing.

Overall, I don't have as impressive achievements as others who have written in ODS Kaggle Crackers, but why not write about them anyway?
One of my first achievements this year was becoming a Kaggle Discussion Grandmaster. After a couple of months of chatting, I entered the top 10 in the global ranking. It's a pretty useless achievement, but it does help to develop your social networks and allows you to get additional perks, which I'll talk about later.

I think everyone is familiar with the Weights & Biases library, so when I suggested on the Kaggle forum (where I was already a Discussion Grandmaster) how to best use the capabilities of Weights & Biases, they wrote to me and offered to become their Ambassador, which was very surprising (and yes, their conditions were simply out of this world). In parallel with the contract we were discussing, they decided to send me a t-shirt with the library's logo and a sticker with the logo (which I put on my laptop). However, they didn't want to sign a contract with me because I'm not of legal age (I'm 17) and it's not allowed by law. Being a child can be really disadvantageous sometimes.

During the summer holidays, I gained experience by participating in Kaggle competitions and won 2 bronze medals and 2 silver medals (I was close to winning a gold medal in one of them). Unfortunately, I couldn't actively participate in the last competition because there was a blackout in Ukraine and we didn't have electricity or water for several days. Nevertheless, my team and I won a t-shirt from Kaggle.

I also became a Kaggle Notebooks Master. This isn't a very significant achievement, but it's still nice to see your name in the top 100.

I also started writing on my blog, sharing my experience and insights on machine learning and Kaggle competitions. I've had a lot of positive feedback and even some offers to write guest posts on other blogs.

In general, I'm very grateful for the support and trust of the Kaggle community, and I hope that in the future, I will be able to help more people learn about machine learning and Kaggle competitions.

To conclude, I would like to say that this year was very strange for me, there were few happy moments (almost no training, terrible bombings, etc.), although the achievements are quite decent. The goal for next year: become a Kaggle Competitions Master.

Good luck to everyone! A peaceful sky overhead!

If you want to reach out to him and offer him a job/sponsorship, which by the look of it, he would nail - his Linkedin profile and email vadimirtlach@gmail.com