Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Travis Oliphant (@teoliphant) take a far-reaching tour through the history of the Python data community. Travis has had a hand in the creation of many open-source projects, most notably the influential libraries, NumPy and SciPy, which helped cement Python as the standard for scientific computing. Join us for the story of a fledgling community from a time “before open-source was cool,” and their lessons for today’s open-source landscape.

In this episode we discuss:

• How biomedical engineering, MRIs, and an unhappy tenure committee led to NumPy and SciPy
• Overcoming early challenges of distribution with Python
• What Travis would have done differently when he wrote NumPy
• Successfully solving the “two-option split” by adding a third option
• Community-driven open-source interacting with company-backed open-source

Links:

• NumPy
• SciPy
• Anaconda
• Quansight
• Conda
• Matplotlib
• Enthought
• TensorFlow
• PyTorch
• MXNet
• PyPi
• Jupyter
• pandas

People mentioned:

• Guido van Rossum (@gvanrossum)
• Robert Kern (Github: @rkern)
• Pearu Peterson (Github: @pearu)
• Wes McKinney (@wesmckinn)
• Charles Harris (Github: @charris)
• Francesc Alted (@francescalted)
• Fernando Perez (@fperez_org)
• Brian Granger (@ellisonbg)

Other episodes:

• TensorFlow with Rajat Monga