DNN 3: Data Science on the Web, Mozilla, Matplotlib, Py-odide // Mike Droettboom

About

In the third episode of Deep Neural Notebooks, I talk with Michael Droettboom, from Mozilla.

Michael is a Staff Data Engineer at Mozilla, where he works on managing the telemetry from Mozilla products, that can be used for improving the user experience and the product itself, while respecting data privacy and making sure that instead of snarfing it all up, only the absolutely minimal data is gathered from the user. He specializes in imaging and data: sheet music, scientific visualization, astronomy, biomedical data and software telemetry. He started his Open Source journey around 2007, contributing to Matplotlib, while he was a Senior Computer Scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute. He later went on to become a lead developer of Matplotlib, carrying on the vision of Matplotlib’s original author, John Hunter.

We talk about

In this episode, we talk about his beginnings - his education in Computers’ and Music, his experience in Astronomy, working at the Space Telescope Science Institute and how he got into contributing to Open Source for Matplotlib. We also talk about his role at Mozilla, the importance of data privacy and the amazing project that he is currently working on - Pyodide, an Open Source tool to empower Data Science in the Browser. Michael also shares some advice for beginners trying to get into Data Science and communities just starting out with Open Source software.

Links: Youtube / Anchor.fm / Apple Podcasts / Spotify