The Test Set by Posit

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

Hadley Wickham, Chief Scientist at Posit and creator of the Tidyverse, shares his journey from a spreadsheet-loving teen to a major figure in data science. He reflects on how messy Excel sheets led to the tidy data revolution and discusses the challenges of developing R packages. The conversation touches on maintaining focus amidst burnout, his fascination with integrating LLMs into data workflows, and how writing books helps tidy ideas. Fun anecdotes, including a custom bike inspired by his Shiny textbook, add a personal touch to his insights.