The Test Set by Posit

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Posit, PBC

6 episodes

1 week ago

For this episode, we turn the mic around. Wes McKinney takes over the interviewer’s chair to chat with his co-host, Michael Chow. Michael’s a principal software engineer at Posit, but he started out studying how people think — literally, with a PhD in cognitive psychology. Somewhere along the way, he got hooked on data science, helped build adaptive learning tools at DataCamp, and now spends his days thinking about how to make Python easier to use and more fun. The two dig into what drives Mi...

Technology

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Technology

Episodes (4/6)

The Test Set by Posit

Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel: Teaching in the AI era — and keeping students engaged

In this conversation, Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, data science educator at Duke University and Posit, joins Michael, Hadley, and Wes to talk about teaching data science in a time when AI can write the code for you. Mine shares her journey from actuarial science to academia, the teaching philosophy behind the “whole game” approach, and her experiments using LLMs for instant student feedback. Along the way, the group dives into the joys and risks of coding by hand, the role of open source in the cla...

1 week ago

54 minutes

The Test Set by Posit

Wes McKinney: Part 2 — The open source hustle and an insider view of Positron

In part two of our conversation with Wes McKinney, we dig into the challenges and realities of sustaining open source development. Wes shares how funding actually works (or doesn’t), why corporate buy-in is essential, and what it’s like building tools across languages, communities, and IDEs. We also talk about the Apache Software Foundation’s role in open governance and the origin of the Positron IDE. What’s Inside: Why passion isn’t enough for open source to scaleApache Arrow’s origin story ...

3 weeks ago

26 minutes

The Test Set by Posit

Wes McKinney: Part 1 — Building Pandas, Arrow, and a speedrunning legacy

Wes McKinney’s fingerprints are all over the modern data stack — from inventing Pandas to co-creating Arrow. But before all that, Wes was organizing speedrun communities and hacking together better ways to wrangle datasets in finance. In this conversation, he shares his origin story and what makes good tools good. Stay tuned for part 2, coming soon. What’s Inside: How frustration with data work led Wes to build pandas (and leave a PhD)A nostalgic dive into the GoldenEye speedrunning sceneWhy ...

1 month ago

23 minutes

The Test Set by Posit

Spreadsheets, bikes, and the accidental empire of R packages — with Hadley Wickham

Before Hadley Wickham became a pillar of modern data science, he was a spreadsheet-loving teenager making databases for his dad’s job. In this episode, he reflects on the early days of his involvement with R, the birth of tidyverse, and how real-world unpredictability — like a bear in a field — shapes data science. What’s Inside: Hadley’s first brush with R code … inside a Word docConsulting as a grad student — and learning what people really want from statsHow messy Excel sheets inspired the...

1 month ago

28 minutes