Growing And Supporting The Data Science Community At Anaconda

Summary

Data scientists are tasked with answering challenging questions using data that is often messy and incomplete. Anaconda is on a mission to make the lives of data professionals more manageable through creation and maintenance of high quality libraries and frameworks, the distribution of an easy to use Python distribution and package ecosystem, and high quality training material. In this episode Kevin Goldsmith, CTO of Anaconda, discusses the technical and social challenges faced by data scientists, the ways that the Python ecosystem has evolved to help address those difficulties, and how Anaconda is engaging with the community to provide high quality tools and education for this constantly changing practice.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python’s role in data and science.

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Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Kevin Goldsmith about Anaconda’s contributions to the Python ecosystem for data science

Interview

Introductions

How did you get introduced to Python?

Can you start by describing what Anaconda focuses on solving for?

What was your path into the CTO position?

From your perspective as the CTO of Anaconda, what are the biggest challenges facing data scientists today?

What is the breakdown between technical and organizational sources for those difficulties?

How is the Anaconda product suite architected to help address some of those problems?

Where are you spending your focus to allow Anaconda to address the current and future needs of data scientists?

Python has been a dominant force in the data and analytics ecosystem for several years now. What do you see as the future of the space? (e.g. monoglot vs. polyglot workflows)

What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen the Anaconda platform used?

What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Anaconda and data science tooling?

Keep In Touch

LinkedIn

@KevinGoldsmith on Twitter

Website

Picks

Tobias

Perdido Street Station

The Scar

Iron Council

Kevin

Lego Typewriter

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, the Data Engineering Podcast for the latest on modern data management.

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Links

Anaconda

Spotify

Lisp

Scheme

C#

Anaconda Nucleus

PyData

AnacondaCon

Grid Computing

PyTorch

Podcast Episode

Tensorflow

Pyston

Podcast Episode

Dask

Podcast Episode

Numba

Panel dashboard framework

Datashader

Jupyter

R

Julia

AstroPy

Podcast Episode

Arrow

Data Teams by Jesse Anderson

Podcast Episode

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA