Inspiring Computing
Gareth Thomas
The Inspiring Computing podcast is where computing meets the real world. This podcast aims to trigger your curiosity by talking to proficient and advanced users of MATLAB, Python, Julia who use these tools to deepen their understanding of the world, simulate, explore trade-offs and gain insights that help companies add more value. In addition to proficient users we will also talk with the product marketing, toolbox authors, package developers and library maintainers to see what drives the development and what issues they are solving for others to benefit from.
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Top 10 Inspiring Computing Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Inspiring Computing episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Inspiring Computing for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Inspiring Computing episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
MicroPython in Orbit: Filip's Story of Satellite Innovation
Inspiring Computing
11/05/24 • 47 min
In this episode of Inspiring Computing, I chat with Filip Rak, the team leader at the Czech Aerospace Research Center. Filip tells me about his journey from engineering to leading the development of attitude and orbit control systems for satellites. We talk about the technical challenges and triumphs, like launching satellites and using MATLAB and MicroPython. Filip also shares how they took a selfie from space at their facility and how this achievement inspired future projects. He also talks about the complexity of late attitude control, using cube sats with limited resources, and their agile risk tolerance approach. The conversation highlights how advanced computing is used in aerospace and emphasizes the importance of balancing innovation with practical constraints.
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The Rise of Narwhals in Open-Source
Inspiring Computing
02/27/25 • 55 min
In this episode of Inspiring Computing, Marco Gorelli discusses the unexpected success of Narwhals, a highly downloaded and extremely lightweight and extensible compatibility layer between data frame libraries such as pandas and polars. We dive into Marco's inspiring journey from a mathematics background to becoming a key contributor in the open-source community.
Marco shares his initial struggles, motivations, and the eventual widespread adoption of narwhals. The conversation goes into the technical underpinnings of his project, from the importance of typing to robust testing techniques. He highlights collaborations, testing practices, and the challenges of maintaining backward compatibility. This episode is both a technical deep dive and an inspiring story of persevering through challenges and negativity to make a substantial impact in the open source ecosystem.
Here are a few links:
Quansight YouTube Channel to see Marco coding live.
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An insider’s view on the heart of NumPy: a conversation with Ralf Gommers
Inspiring Computing
10/01/24 • 44 min
In this episode, I have a wonderful conversation with Ralf Gommers, a director of Quansight Labs, and he's a key contributor to NumPy. He shares his journey of how he started working on and contributing to several open source projects. But more importantly, the journey that he took inside NumPy.
NumPy is a project that most scientific computing projects rely on heavily. Ralf shares the thought behind its governance model, the importance of having community funding models, and how to maintain long term open-source projects.
Pluto making scientific computing accessible and fun
Inspiring Computing
04/05/23 • 60 min
In this episode, we explore Pluto. It is a Julia package, which enables people to ride Pluto notebooks. These notebooks are used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world to help explore the world around them. We talked to Fons to understand how he and some of his co-creators started this project, what motivated them to create yet another notebook framework and what are the key differences towards other notebooks, such as Jupiter, MATLAB Live editor, and maybe a little bit of Observable.
In addition to this, we will also explore how Pluto's are used in education with the Gerhard's experience as a teacher and a community manager, as the team collects a wide variety of use cases of where and how Pluto is used and how it helped people explore the world around. But not only do we understand and explore how it got going, how it's used today, we also take a sneak preview of what's to come in the future and understand how the community and the team make their decisions of what are the new features to be implemented and why. And it all revolves around some of their guiding principles that the team has put in place.
Useful links that are referred in the episode
Why Inspiring Computing
Inspiring Computing
01/09/23 • 4 min
In this short episode Gareth Thomas the host of Inspiring Computing will share the motivation this podcast. In short it answers the why, how, what, who and for whom this podcast is for.
PIVLab Unveiled: A Deep Dive into Particle Image Velocimetry with MATLAB
Inspiring Computing
05/21/24 • 52 min
Join the conversation with William Thielicke, the developer of PIVlab, as he shares insights into the world of particle image velocimetery (PIV) and its applications. Discover how PIV accurately measures fluid velocities, non invasively revolutionising research across the industries. Delve into the development journey of PI lab, including collaborations, key features and future advancements for aerodynamic studies, explore the advanced hardware setups camera technologies, and educational prospects offered by PIVlab, for enhanced fluid velocity measurements. If you are interested in the hardware he speaks of check out the company: Optolution.
The New Urban Equation: Data,Transit, and Sustainable Cities
Inspiring Computing
05/27/24 • 44 min
This podcast, delves into innovative research, leveraging data science to enhance public transit access to suburban areas, based on a paper written by Alma Liezenga. The episode explores the intersection of urban transportation, social impact, and sustainable solutions emphasizing the importance of equitable access to jobs and services. The conversation portrays the significance of using data analysis and technology to improve transit efficiency while considering social implications and urban planning challenges.
See her paper here.
Mastering Movement: Calculating Tram Motion Envelopes
Inspiring Computing
10/15/24 • 41 min
In this episode, we go deep into the tram manufacturing business with Robert Grepl more specifically, what does it take to be able to create a tram that does not crash into any infrastructure in an existing city? Have you ever wondered why there's only a couple of centimeters between the tram and the infrastructure? How do tram manufacturers and cities, figure out which obstacles to avoid, and what infrastructure needs to be built or avoided when a tram has put you into a city
Robert explains from the beginning where trams manufacturers in cities make decisions what the common tools they use and how his company, which created a simulation engine called TRAMotion helps solve this problem.
Sailing Towards a Sustainable Future: The Role of Hydrogen in Maritime Engineering
Inspiring Computing
06/04/24 • 46 min
Embark on a journey of innovation. As we explore the world of zero emission vessels powered by hydrogen cells. Dive into the educational background of Franziska and automation engineer at Future Proof Shipping. As she shares insights on retrofitting vessels for zero emissions, the dynamics of hydrogen fuel cells and the pivotal role of data analysis in the transforming maritime transport for a sustainable future.
Polars - Lightning-fast DataFrame library for Rust and Python
Inspiring Computing
04/25/23 • 54 min
In this episode of Inspiring Computing we talked to Ritchie Vink was the author of polars. Polars is a Python package written in rust and anyone who is ever used pandas will for sure find this episode interesting, as polars has incredible speedups compared to pandas. But in order to do so, it is interesting to hear from , Ritchie, where he got his inspiration from, how did he go about creating such a powerful package and where is he actually going in the future?
And this episode, he talks about some of the optimizations that he implemented.
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FAQ
How many episodes does Inspiring Computing have?
Inspiring Computing currently has 27 episodes available.
What topics does Inspiring Computing cover?
The podcast is about Mathematics, Podcasts, Technology, Science and Python.
What is the most popular episode on Inspiring Computing?
The episode title 'MicroPython in Orbit: Filip's Story of Satellite Innovation' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Inspiring Computing?
The average episode length on Inspiring Computing is 53 minutes.
How often are episodes of Inspiring Computing released?
Episodes of Inspiring Computing are typically released every 6 days, 23 hours.
When was the first episode of Inspiring Computing?
The first episode of Inspiring Computing was released on Jan 9, 2023.
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