Wes McKinney

Principal Architect, Posit PBC · 1 appearance on the record.

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engineerfounderauthorexecutiveinvestor@wesmckinn ↗

Wes McKinney is best known as the creator of the Python data analysis library pandas and the co-creator of Apache Arrow and Ibis. He authored the book Python for Data Analysis and co-founded startups including Datapad and Ursa Computing.

12statements → 9claims → 5claims resolved → 80%fully supported → 4/5average certainty → 1.92/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 3said about them ↓

4 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 9 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 8 assertions · 1 opinion · 1 insight · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 9 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Wes argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Running Apache Spark on a single node is slower than Pandas
“You can use spark at the single node scale as an alternative to pandas through the koalas interface, but you'll find that for many workloads, it's simply slower than pandas, which is not super impressive.”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 24:30 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)

How they sound: speaking style how? →

231 words/min while actually speaking · 74.7 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Wes McKinney: only 6 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 6 raw tape exchanges is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,576 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Wes McKinney said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Commercial entities are necessary to scale and sustain open-source projects
“It became clear to me and to many people that that to have more of a commercial engine behind Arrow and the Arrow ecosystem was important for enabling the ecosystem to continue to grow for us to be able to pour a lot more resources into the open source project…”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 19:15 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Opinion
Apache Spark failed to effectively shrink down to single-node scale
“One of the things that you find with things like Spark is that they really failed to shrink down and, Effectively do computing at the single node scale.”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 24:22 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Over 90% of Python tabular data passes through Pandas
“I'd say, you know, nine, more than 90% of the data that's coming into structured data processing in, in the Python ecosystem, tabular data processing is passing through pandas at some point at some point in its lifetime.”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 0:46 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
McKinney predicts every data warehouse will soon support Apache Arrow
“So I think that, that, you know, in the course of the next few years you know, pretty much every database system, every data warehouse Is going to support aero based import and export in some format.”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 16:59 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Supported
Running Apache Spark on a single node is slower than Pandas
“You can use spark at the single node scale as an alternative to pandas through the koalas interface, but you'll find that for many workloads, it's simply slower than pandas, which is not super impressive.”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 24:30 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Pandas never had a significant corporate sponsor
“Pandas never really had a significant corporate sponsor who was you know putting in the majority of contributions. Like it really was a community project almost, you know from the get go.”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 1:53 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Supported
ODBC and JDBC were never designed for bulk data transfer
“Protocols like interfaces like ODBC and JDBC were never designed Or intended for bulk data transfer, like on the order of gigabytes, for example.”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 12:11 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Apache Arrow strictly complements rather than competes with Databricks
“It's neither it's neither a competitor or a replacement, so it's strictly a complimentary technology.”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 21:40 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Supported
Pandas has had well over 2,000 open-source contributors
“I know there've been well over 2000 contributors at this point.”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 1:29 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Disclosure
Apache Arrow was built to bridge database and data science developers
“For me, one of the primary motivators was to create a technology which could you know, proverbially tie the room together and enable that, that cross-pollination between database developers and data science developers that had just never never existed because …”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 11:21 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Supported
Snowflake and Google BigQuery support exporting query results to Apache Arrow
“Snowflake exports supports exporting query results to arrow format. So it is big query.”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 15:54 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Partly supported
The term 'data frame' originated in the R programming language
“Data frame is a term that arose from originally in the R programming language which was based on the S and S plus programming languages.”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 3:47 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)

The other half of the tape: Wes McKinney's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 1 episode on the MAD Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Julien Le Dem 3

Every mention by year

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2021 3 mentions in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, Firs Feb 1, 2021 18m
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