
The Test Set by Posit
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.
Episodes
8 episodes
Julia Silge: Part 2 — Glue work, licensing, and open source in the age of LLMs
In part two of our conversation with Julia Silge, we discuss how work actually ships: the boundaries, the glue, and the tools that turn noise into signal. From there, we go macro and wonder what the LLM era means for humanity’s contributions, p...
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Season 1
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Episode 8
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28:17

Julia Silge: Part 1 — Positron, pineapple pizza, and the art of iteration
In part one of our conversation with Julia Silge, astronomer-turned–data-science leader, we explore why data science needs a different kind of IDE. Julia takes us inside Positron, Posit’s next-generation, data-scientist-first environment, and u...
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Season 1
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Episode 7
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38:45

Michael Chow: From psychology and Python to constrained creativity
For this episode, we turn the mic around. Wes McKinney takes over the interviewer’s chair to chat with his co-host, Michael Chow. Michael’s a principal software engineer at Posit, but he started out studying how people think — literally, with a...
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Season 1
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Episode 6
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1:07:24

Roger Peng: Sustaining data science — in classrooms, code, and conversations
Michael, Hadley, and Wes welcome Roger Peng, professor of statistics and data science at UT Austin and co-host of Not So Standard Deviations. Together they trace Roger’s journey from early R adopter to pioneering online educator and pr...
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Season 1
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Episode 5
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45:05

Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel: Teaching in the AI era — and keeping students engaged
In this conversation, Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, data science educator at Duke University and Posit, joins Michael, Hadley, and Wes to talk about teaching data science in a time when AI can write the code for you. Mine shares her journey from actua...
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Season 1
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Episode 4
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54:47

Wes McKinney: Part 2 — The open source hustle and an insider view of Positron
In part two of our conversation with Wes McKinney, we dig into the challenges and realities of sustaining open source development. Wes shares how funding actually works (or doesn’t), why corporate buy-in is essential, and what it’s like buildin...
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Season 1
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Episode 3
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26:33

Wes McKinney: Part 1 — Building Pandas, Arrow, and a speedrunning legacy
Wes McKinney’s fingerprints are all over the modern data stack — from inventing Pandas to co-creating Arrow. But before all that, Wes was organizing speedrun communities and hacking together better ways to wrangle datasets in finance. In this c...
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Season 1
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Episode 2
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23:22

Hadley Wickham: Spreadsheets, bikes, and the accidental empire of R packages
Before Hadley Wickham became a pillar of modern data science, he was a spreadsheet-loving teenager making databases for his dad’s job. In this episode, he reflects on the early days of his involvement with R, the birth of tidyverse, and how rea...
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Season 1
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Episode 1
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28:28
