Nathan Goldbaum
I am a software engineer at Quansight Labs where I help maintain NumPy and contribute to open source software on behalf of consulting clients. My background is in astrophysics, I completed my PhD in 2015 at UC Santa Cruz and worked as a postdoc and research scientist at the University of Illinois. During my academic career I become increasingly involved in community open source projects, contributing to projects across the scientific python ecosystem and as a maintainer of the yt project. Since then I've transitioned from academia to industry, but I still believe strongly in open science and the importance of community research software to building reproducible scientific workflows.
Sessions
Support for string data in NumPy has long been a sore spot for the community. At the beginning of 2023 I was given the task to solve that problem by writing a new UTF-8 variable-length string DType leveraging the new NumPy DType API. I will offer my personal narrative of how I accomplished that goal over the course of 2023 and offer my experience as a model for others to take on difficult projects in the scientific python ecosystem, offering tips for how to get help when needed and contribute productively to an established open source community.
With the recent release of NumPy 2.0, the NumPy maintainers are looking for feedback on the release. Are there issues that are blocking your ability to migrate to using NumPy 2.0? Are there things you wish we had fixed or changed but didn't make it into the 2.0 release? Any changes you really don't like? Please come and let us know. Your feedback will directly influence how NumPy 2.1 looks and how we manage major releases in the future.
This BOF will serve as a forum for maintainers and users of scientific python packages to discuss support for thread-based parallelism in the free-threaded build of CPython. Replacing approaches to parallelism in many APIs that leverage multiprocessing with Python threads is very attractive, but adding thread safety to libraries after the fact may be challenging. Users can share workflows they want to attack with the free-threaded interpreter. Maintainers can seek advice and offer their experience so far adding support.