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 and how it was pitchedHow open governance enables trust between competitorsThe thinking behind Positron, Posit’s next-gen IDEPolyglot programming – Designing tools that bridge the R/Python divideLLMs and data UX: Why modern IDEs need to serve both humans and modelsDay-to-day coding, advising, investing, and context-switchingMetalheads unite
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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 read_csv performance is a deeply personal crusadeLessons from convincing friends to quit finance and go open sourceFounding startups, launching Arrow, and the Ibis origin storyThe beauty of letting contributors take the reinsShout-out to Philip Cloud, pandas’ resident pun masterWhy open communities win — and what it takes to build them
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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 tidy data revolutionWriting R packages as a form of self-defense (and productivity)The secret sauce of building the tidyverse teamOn focus, burnout, and saying “no” to GitHub pull requestsCurrent obsession: using LLMs to make data science faster, easier, and more funHow writing books is a form of tidying ideas, and how a Shiny textbook led to a custom bike
A Posit podcast for data science junkies, anomaly hunters, and those who play outside the confidence interval. Hosted by Michael Chow, with co-hosts Wes McKinney & Hadley Wickham.
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