Our guest today is Ritchie Vink, CEO & Founder of Polars: an open source data manipulation library known for being extremely fast. As of today, polars has over 32k stars on github. 

In our conversation, Ritchie first explains how Polar which started as a side project evolved to what it is today. We then discuss the differences between Polars and Pandas, why Polars is fast and optimised and dig into Polars cloud: a platform which manages the compute infrastructure, allowing users to focus solely on writing queries. 

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👉 From beginner to advanced LLM developer course by Towards AI (use the code AISTORIES10 to get a 10% discount): https://academy.towardsai.net/courses/beginner-to-advanced-llm-dev?ref=63e5e3

Link to Polars: https://pola.rs/

Follow Ritchie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ritchievink/

Follow Neil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leiserneil/  

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(00:00) Intro

(02:23) How Ritchie got into Data & AI

(08:00) How Polars started

(12:02) Query Optimization

(14:38) Polars vs. Pandas

(22:16) Why Pandas is still popular

(27:52) Polars Cloud

(34:45) Polars’ Challenges & Future Roadmap

(40:57) Career Advice