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Technology

The Test Set by Posit

Posit, PBC

A Posit podcast for data science junkies, anomaly hunters, and those who play outside the confidence interval. Hosted by Michael Chow, with co-hosts Wes McKinney & Hadley Wickham.

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  • 24 episodes
  • fortnightly
  • Avg 1 hr 3 min
  • English

Episodes 24

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  • S1 · E12
    Dec 15, 2025 · 51 min

    Marco Gorelli: Narwhals, ecosystem glue, and the value of boring work

    You’ve probably used Narwhals without realizing it. It’s the compatibility layer helping apps and libraries like Plotly play nice with Pandas, Polars, Arrow, and more — while keeping computation native instead of converting everything to Pandas. In this episode, Marco Gorelli explains how his weekend experiment turned into essential ecosystem infrastructure and why data types, not APIs, are where interoperability gets tricky. Plus what it takes to build trust and community around an open-source project. Episode Notes Marco shares the Narwhals origin story (including the meme-powered name), the hard edge cases that live in data types and null semantics, and why he’s cautious about using AI for code generation when correctness hinges on tiny details. We also jam on proactive “GitHub surfing,” conference talks as trust-building exercises, celebrating contributors, and how early commit messages capture the genuine excitement of building something new. What’s Inside Narwhals 101: You’ve probably used it (even if you didn’t know it) The real interoperability traps: data types, null semantics, and “looks-the-same” operations Why expression systems won, and how they shaped Marco’s approach — with nods to Ibis, Polars, and Pandas Open source as social work: proactive outreach, trust-building, and a Discord-powered community Extending Narwhals to new engines, starting with the Daft plugin

  • S1 · E11
    Dec 1, 2025 · 51 min

    Kelly Bodwin — Quarto hacks, AI in the classroom, and why R should stay weird

    In this episode, we’re joined by Kelly Bodwin — candy corn defender, board game enthusiast, and Associate Professor of Statistics and Data Science at Cal Poly. We discuss her path from English and French to statistics, how she builds teaching tools and navigates AI in the classroom, and what it takes to keep a programming community weird in the best possible way. Episode notes Kelly is curious, collaborative, and unafraid to lean in on quirky. Kelly shares how she balances teaching three courses with master's student supervision, applied research projects spanning Polish history and beyond, and her belief that the best part of academia is the people. We also dive into the practical and philosophical challenges of staying current in a field that reinvents itself every few years. What's inside Breakfast mixology Building Quarto extensions with JavaScript and AI When ChatGPT helps students learn (and when it doesn't) Applied stats meets history: analyzing social networks from the Polish Revolution Why remarkable, welcoming communities matter more than perfect code

  • S1 · E10
    Nov 17, 2025 · 42 min

    James Blair: Part 2 — Solutions engineering, critical thinking, and staying human

    This episode is Part 2 of our conversation with James Blair. He explains how he found his “accidental perfect fit” as a solutions engineer and how that role became a pipeline into product management. Get a peek into the AI-powered tooling he’s now building for the Posit ecosystem, and hear how he’s using Claude Code, Positron Assistant, and DataBot to generate synthetic, industry-specific demos on the fly — plus, why the real magic is keeping humans firmly in the loop. Episode notes This is a story about listening deeply to users and using AI to make that listening scale. James explains what solutions engineers actually do, how that work shaped Posit’s product team, and how synthetic data plus agents are changing the way they build demos and teach data science. What’s inside What a solutions engineer really is and why the role was such a good fit for James How solutions engineering became a natural pathway into product management at Posit Multi-agent “bot posse” workflows and why context management matters Using AI the right way and why code literacy, critical thinking, and staying human are the real superpowers in an AI-saturated world

  • S1 · E9
    Nov 4, 2025 · 29 min

    James Blair: Part 1 — Portfolios, practice, and staying curious

    In Part 1 of our conversation with James Blair, we trace his delightfully non-linear path from childhood robotics dreams to journalism to R, with a few stops in between. We hear about the Shiny app that changed his career, plus a candid roundtable with Michael, Hadley, and Wes about whether a data-science master’s still pays off in the age of AI. Episode notes This is a story about staying hands-on and fiercely inquisitive — whether analyzing bike telemetry or in teaching data science. James shares how early experimentation with Shiny helped shape his career, and how curiosity (not credentials) still powers meaningful work in data science. What’s inside A winding path from robotics to journalism to psychology to data science Discovering the power of applied stats The value (and limits) of a data-science master’s in a shifting AI landscape Fighting confirmation bias: good analysis resists the answer you want

Showing 21–24 of 24 episodes