All posts of Ian

Leadership discussion session at PyDataLondon 2024

At this year’s PyDataLondon 2024 conference I ran my regular Leadership discussion for team leaders & department heads. It is an open session for 40-60 senior people, under Chatham House rules, to discuss issues and seek feedback. We had a lot of happy people in the room for this session (photo below – taken with […]
1 month ago

What I’ve been up to since 2022

This has been terribly quiet since July 2022, oops. It turns out that having an infant totally sucks your time! In the meantime I’ve continued to build up: Training courses – I’ve just listed my new Fast Pandas course plus the existing Successful Data Science Projects and Software Engineering for Data Scientists with runs of […]
2 months ago

My first commit to Pandas

I’ve used the Pandas data science toolkit for over a decade and I’ve filed a couple of issues, but I’ve never contributed to the source. At the weekend I got to balance the books a little by making my first commit. With this pull request I fixed the recent request to update the pct_change docs […]
3 years ago

Skinny Pandas Riding on a Rocket at PyDataGlobal 2020

On November 11th we saw the most ambitious ever PyData conference – PyData Global 2020 was a combination of world-wide PyData groups putting on a huge event to both build our international community and to leverage the on-line only conferences that we need to run during Covid 19. The conference brought together almost 2,000 attendees […]
4 years ago

“Making Pandas Fly” at EuroPython 2020

I’ve had a chance to return to talking about High Performance Python at EuroPython 2020 after my first tutorial on this topic back in 2011 in Florence. Today I spoke on Making Pandas Fly with a focus on making Pandas run faster. This covered: Categories and RAM-saving datatypes to make 100-500x speed-ups (well, some of […]
4 years ago

Weekish notes

I’ve recently switched back from Sourdough yeast to dried packet yeast mix, given a recipe by a colleague (thanks Nick!). I immediately set to work modifying his recipe (well, cutting out steps if we’re honest). The first loaf looked fine but was bland – I cut out too much salt. The next was really very […]
4 years ago

Weekish notes

I gave another iteration of my Making Pandas Fly talk sequence for PyDataAmsterdam recently and received some lovely postcards from attendees as a result. I’ve also had time to list new iterations of my training courses for Higher Performance Python (October) and Software Engineering for Data Scientists (September), both will run virtually via Zoom & […]
4 years ago

“Making Pandas Fly” for PyDataAmsterdam 2020

I thank the PyDataAmsterdam 2020 organisers for another chance to speak on Making Pandas Fly (PyDataAmsterdam 2020). This variant of the talk focuses more on: Understanding when categories beat strings and smaller floats beat larger ones What’s happening with NumPy behind the scenes How we can save 50% of our RAM (and so fit in […]
4 years ago

Weeknote (dtype-diet)

Over the weekend I hacked on dtype_diet – a tool for Pandas users that checks their DataFrame to see if smaller datatypes might be applicable. If so they’d offer no data loss and a reduction in RAM, for Categorical data there’s also the possibility of faster calculations. This tool makes no changes, it recommends the […]
4 years ago