The Rise of Narwhals in Open-Source
02/27/25 • 55 min
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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.
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.
Previous Episode
Exploring stdlib: JavaScript's Answer to Technical Computing
This episode of Inspiring Computing features a discussion with Athan, the maintainer of stdlib, a JavaScript library designed for numerical and scientific computing. Athan shares his experience and his career journey, starting from a non-computer science background through his PhD program at Oxford and eventually leading to his passion for open-source development.
He explains the unique benefits and challenges of building scientific computing tools for the web, emphasizing the powerful capabilities of JavaScript when written correctly. Athan also discusses the importance of standardizing arrays, the evolution of web technologies, and the collaborative efforts required to make projects such as stdlib.io successful.
This episode highlights industry use cases, potential applications, and the ongoing efforts to attract contributors and to fund open-source initiatives.
For the curious here is the GitHub repo.
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