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 conversation, he shares his origin story and what makes good tools good.

In Part 2 of our conversation with Wes McKinney, we go beyond the code and into the complicated, mission-driven world of open source funding, community-building, and product strategy. Wes talks about what it takes to make critical tools like Arrow sustainable — from pitching to mavericks at Two Sigma to navigating the politics of Apache Software Foundation governance. Also, metal.

Roger Peng is a professor of Statistics and Data Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, and he’s also the host of a popular data science podcast, Not So Standard Deviations. We talk about the evolution of the data science community, how the conversations have changed, and why teaching remains central to Roger’s mission.

Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel is a Professor of the Practice and the Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Department of Statistical Science and an affiliated faculty in the Computational Media, Arts, and Cultures program at Duke University. She joins The Test Set to talk about publishing code, building narrative, and wrestling with ambiguity.