Julia Dispatch

We're back from our surprising hiatus with a very exciting round: Firoozeh, Leticia and Skylar. Their Julia journeys crossed in their engagement with the Julia Gender Inclusive and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives. We briefly talk about their personal stories before delving into the inclusiveness topic. We discuss the impression and perspective of female participants at a so far male-dominated JuliaCon. The ladies share with us all the activities they have been involved in. And we dive into what problem's they perceive and how everybody in the community can help make Julia a more inclusive community.

Firoozeh Dastur is a theoretical mathematician specializing in algebraic and tropical geometry with a strong focus on leveraging computer algebra systems for advanced mathematical research. Her other interests include high-performance computing (HPC) tools, with a particular goal of making distributed computing accessible to all domain scientists. As a passionate educator, Firoozeh is committed to fostering an inclusive learning environment that empowers the next generation of researchers and innovators. In her spare time, she develops Julia libraries that reflect her interests in distributed computing and computer algebra systems.

Leticia Madureira is a PhD candidate in Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research lies in the computational quantum chemistry field, applying electronic structure methods to elucidate interactions in chemical processes, such as polymerization reactions, photodegradation, etc. She currently collaborates with the Julia Lab in developing fast, free, open-source and efficient computer programs for electronic structure calculations, and expanding the scope of current methods available in the programming language. Some of the packages under development are: BasisSets.jl, OohataHuzinaga.jl, under the HartreeFoca GitHub organization. She aims to leverage computational studies to investigate theoretical paradigms in Chemistry by developing quantum chemical DFT-based algorithms capable of accurately computing electron-electron correlation in molecules through stability analysis of SCF, enabling broader exploration of transition-state theory, excited state dynamics, ground state geometry predictions and bond dissociation calculations. One of her main philosophies is to make theory and computation as accessible as possible, and to promote computational thinking in Chemistry through teaching, as she thinks quality education is an empowerment tool to the current and next generations of scientists, and teaching is the most noble academic activity!

Skylar Gering is a PhD student through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Joint Program. Her research is focused on environmental fluid mechanics, specifically the performance and control of floating offshore wind turbines. She previously worked on climate and sea ice modeling, which led her to start using Julia. She is also a contributor to the computational geometry library GeometryOps.jl. Beyond her research, she is passionate about climate change solutions and promoting equality in scientific/software communities.

Julia Gender Inclusive website: https://juliagenderinclusive.github.io/

Leticia's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@leticiamadureira4023

We're still in the process of ironing out our technical gear and setup as you might have noticed. Bear with us. Eventually, we'll have figured it out.

Recorded on: 2025/01/04

Hosts: Chris Rackauckas, Michael Tiemann

Editor: Stazi

Find us everywhere:

https://juliadispatch.fm

https://github.com/JuliaDispatch/

https://www.youtube.com/@JuliaDispatch

https://anchor.fm/s/fc63539c/podcast/rss

Today, we start a new series. Chris and Michael discuss the contents of the "This month in Julia world - 2025-02". We cover enhancements to Revise.jl, the introduction of JET.jl as a new language server, advancements in compiling Julia for embedded systems, challenges with multi-threading, improvements in the package manager, and the refactoring of the Julia compiler.

We plan to make this a regular feature. Please let us know what you think about the format.

This month in Julia world - 2025-02: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/this-month-in-julia-world-2025-02/126783

Recorded on: 2025/03/21

Hosts: Chris Rackauckas, Michael Tiemann

Editor: Stazi

Find us everywhere:

https://juliadispatch.fm

https://github.com/JuliaDispatch/

https://www.youtube.com/@JuliaDispatch

https://anchor.fm/s/fc63539c/podcast/rss

Today we're joined by Simon Christ who is "the computer guy in a biological department". Moving from rock solid C, advancing to C++, he discovered Julia when he had been frustrated enough by his prior programming experiences. Simon has fixed the PGF backend for Plots.jl and as time goes by found himself among the current project leads. Simon shares with us his experience about maturing and maintaining a foundational package in the ecosystem and why now it's the right time to work on a major version update. We also talk about the Plots.jl publication, the importance of reproducible science and package maintenance, and which colors should not be on plots.

Simon Christ is a research software engineer at the Computational Biology department of the Institute of Cell Biology and Biophysics at the Leibniz University of Hannover. He has obtained a PhD in theoretical biological physics in 2020. Simon is one of the maintainers of Plots.jl, one of the most well-known plotting libraries in Julia. He has also published a paper about Plots.jl in the Journal of Open Research Software.

Plots.jl: https://github.com/JuliaPlots/Plots.jl

Plots.jl paper: https://doi.org/10.5334/jors.431

Plots.jl Zulip channel: https://julialang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/236493-plots.2Ejl

Simon's Github account: https://github.com/BeastyBlacksmith

Huge thanks to Jürgen Fuhrmann and the Weierstrass Institute Berlin for hosting Simon and Chris during the recording.

Jürgen's homepage: https://www.wias-berlin.de/people/fuhrmann/?lang=1

Weierstrass Institute's homepage: https://www.wias-berlin.de

Recorded on: 2025/01/14

Hosts: Chris Rackauckas, Michael Tiemann

Editor: Stazi

Find us everywhere:

https://juliadispatch.fm

https://github.com/JuliaDispatch/

https://www.youtube.com/@JuliaDispatch

https://anchor.fm/s/fc63539c/podcast/rss

This is a special episode of the Julia Dispatch podcast where we have a panel discussion with climate scientists and Earth observation specialists to talk about Julia. In this episode we talk with a litany of experts in climate modeling, satellite data analysis, and data visualization a multitude of questions like: what inroads has Julia made into the climate sciences community? What are Julia's strengths in this domain? What are the weaknesses and how are they looking to be addressed? What is the current state of climate models being built in Julia and how are they performing against Fortran baselines? And what is the future of large-scale data visualization tools in Julia? Specifically we focus on tools like SpeedyWeather.jl, Makie.jl, Oceananigans.jl, NetCDF.jl, and many many more.

Recorded on: 2024/1/27

Hosts: Chris Rackauckas, Michael Tiemann

Editor: Stazi

Find us everywhere:

https://juliadispatch.fm

https://github.com/JuliaDispatch/

https://www.youtube.com/@JuliaDispatch

https://anchor.fm/s/fc63539c/podcast/rss

We start the year with a first: first time Chris and Michael meet a stranger through Julia Dispatch. Today, we have Kyle Conel on the show who is the main developer of the game engine JulGame. Kyle shares with us how an early passion about video games has made him switch majors in college to become a software developer. He talks about how he's learning by doing, how you can start in Julia with an object-oriented mind set and only later take full advantage of the multiple dispatch paradigm, and his plans to (eventually) publish a game developed in Julia to Steam.

Kyle Conel is a professional software engineer, currently working at Atlassian. In his spare time, though, his passion is game development. He's stumbled across Julia via a random Google search in 2021 and he's started to create a game engine in Julia. He shares his development progress and some insights via his social media accounts on Twitch and Youtube.

Apologies for the audio quality during the first 20 or so minutes of this episode. Michael needs to get better headphones.

JulGame.jl: https://github.com/Kyjor/JulGame.jl

JulGame Example Platformer: https://github.com/Kyjor/JulGame-Example

JulGame 0.1.0 tutorial playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJH5OA8iIGU&list=PLdRJdDFCl0uKyFQiZBIENYUh9s6iEgmJM

Kyle's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Kyjor_

Kyle's Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/kyjor/

Hosts: Chris Rackauckas, Michael Tiemann

Editor: Stazi

Find us everywhere:

https://juliadispatch.fm

https://github.com/JuliaDispatch/

https://www.youtube.com/@JuliaDispatch

https://anchor.fm/s/fc63539c/podcast/rss

It's our final episode-of this year. Today we are joined by Dr. Karandeep Singh who shares his story from gamer to doctor and how the realization "You can continue writing code-just do it in whatever field you go into" has led him to his current role. He then introduces us to the Tidyverse and Tidier.jl, tells us a bit about its origin story and how Tidier.jl being available in Julia might be another good reason to give Julia a try. And he explains how the features of Julia have given Tidier.jl a very Julian flavor.

In the academic world, Karandeep Singh, MD, MMSc is the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Chancellor’s Endowed Chair in Digital Health Innovation and Associate Professor in Biomedical Informatics at UC San Diego, where he also serves as Chief Health AI Officer for UC San Diego Health. In these roles, Dr. Singh leads AI initiatives within the Jacobs Center for Health Innovation and oversees AI strategy and governance for the health system. In the Julia community, Dr. Singh has initiated the TidierOrg, an effort to bring R's Tidyverse ecosystem natively to Julia. Starting only in 2023, TidierOrg now reproduces many of the original Tidyverse's packages with extensive training material in the making.

Tidier.jl's homepage: https://tidierorg.github.io/Tidier.jl/stable/

Recorded on: 2024/11/25

Hosts: Chris Rackauckas, Michael Tiemann

Editor: Stazi

Find us everywhere:

https://juliadispatch.fm

https://github.com/JuliaDispatch/

https://www.youtube.com/@JuliaDispatch

https://anchor.fm/s/fc63539c/podcast/rss

Today, we're especially grateful for Guillaume's patience with us (it's pronounced Gi-yohm!). He shares his story going from beginner to maintainer in no time, discusses why it's so important to help each other without judgement, and reveals the surprising connection between Modern Julia Workflows and DifferentiationInterface.jl. We had a great time together chatting about open source software, and we're sure you will, too!

Guillaume Dalle specializes in machine learning and optimization. He is currently finishing his postdoc at EPFL and will soon become a permanent researcher at École des Ponts, near Paris. His PhD dissertation received the "Prix de thèse maths-entreprises", a national award for the best thesis in mathematics with industrial applications. Within the Julia community, his work on DifferentiationInterface.jl and the Modern Julia Workflows earned him the Julia Community Prize in 2024. You may also recognize him from his cheesy song parodies on YouTube, but he will deny everything if you ask.

Guillaume's home page: https://gdalle.github.io/

Modern Julia Workflows: https://modernjuliaworkflows.org/

DifferentiationInterface.jl: https://github.com/JuliaDiff/DifferentiationInterface.jl

JuliaCon talk "Gradients for everyone": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww3ntpyxNtI

Guillaume's top secret YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@PianoHamster

Recorded on: 2024/10/15

Hosts: Chris Rackauckas, Michael Tiemann

Editor: Stazi

Find us everywhere:

https://juliadispatch.fm

https://github.com/JuliaDispatch/

https://www.youtube.com/@JuliaDispatch

https://anchor.fm/s/fc63539c/podcast/rss

In this episode, we sit down with Παναγιώτης Γεωργακόπουλος. We discuss the evolution of the Pluto project and the user experience philosophy behind it. Παναγιώτης shares with us some of the technical and design challenges that come with it, but also how far reaching some of these principles can be. And we discuss, how open source projects and community development can come together and reinforce each other.

Παναγιώτης Γεωργακόπουλος is a software engineer hailing from Athens, Greece. In his own words: "I've been a software engineer, a business analyst, a consultant, a data entry intern, a waiter and a sailor." In 2020, he has started to contribute to the Pluto ecosystem and has continued to do so ever since. He's currently a software engineer at JuliaHub, working on JuliaSim, Pluto, Julia Web stuff and Ask.AI.

Link to the featured notebook: https://featured.plutojl.org/puzzles-games/dither.html

Link to Pluto multiplayer PR: https://github.com/fonsp/Pluto.jl/pull/2296

Recorded on: 2024/10/30

Hosts: Chris Rackauckas, Michael Tiemann

Editor: Stazi

Find us everywhere:

https://juliadispatch.fm

https://github.com/JuliaDispatch/

https://youtube.com/@JuliaDispatch

https://anchor.fm/s/fc63539c/podcast/rss

Today, we talk with someone who might or might not be the man himself, but is definitely one of the co-creators of the Julia programming language: Jeff Bezanson. Jeff shares with us some of the origin story of Julia and how multiple dispatch found its way into the language. Then, we dig a bit deeper into the recent advancements of static compilation of Julia. Jeff explains why we had to wait so long, what the difficult design decisions have been, and the additional hurdles that had to be cleared.

Welcome back, friends! Today, we exchange with Alex and Yassin about their Google Summer of Code project working on Symbolics.jl. They tell us their road to Julia and to their joint Google Summer of Code project, more specifically. They discuss the motivation behind the project, the challenges they faced, and the progress they made. They also touch on the importance of open-source code and the future of symbolic computation in Julia. They also discuss the experience of remote collaboration and the future of Symbolics.jl.

Yassin ElBedwihy is a second year communications engineering bachelors at Zewail city UST (University of Science and Technology) based in Cairo, Egypt.