The Test Set by Posit
by Posit, PBC
Latest episode
The Bus Has to Jump 50 Feet — Greg Swinehart
The Bus Has to Jump 50 Feet — Greg Swinehart
About this podcast
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
The newest 20 of 32 episodes
- The Bus Has to Jump 50 Feet — Greg Swinehart · 54 min · Season 1 Episode 32Greg Swinehart mocked up the first rstudio.org, and JJ Allaire and Joe Cheng sent it back for looking too good. He's been at it ever since, from hex stickers to Shiny's new look…
- You're the Base, AI Is the Exponent — with Tareef Kawaf · 1 h 17 minPosit CEO Tareef Kawaf’s theory about LLMs is that they work like an exponent on whoever you already are. Greater than one and you compound. Under one and you accelerate in the…
- Smuggled Gold and Untrustworthy Intuition — with Leland McInnes · 60 min · Season 1 Episode 30Leland McInnes has spent his career building tools a lot data scientists take for granted (UMAP, HDBSCAN), and amusingly the applications of those tools keep getting stranger. On…
- Nobody Remembers Your 20 Charts — with Ruth Milligan · 1 h 1 min · Season 1 Episode 29Ruth Milligan has coached hundreds of conference speakers, curates TEDx Columbus, and wrote The Motivated Speaker. She's here to tell you that speaking is habitual, not natural…
- Let the Agent Cook — with Trevor Manz · 1 h 10 min · Season 1 Episode 28Trevor Manz went from measuring plant apertures by hand in a wet lab to building the notebook that lets coding agents take the wheel. The creator of anywidget and founding…
- The Answer Was Never Us — with Leilani Battle · 1 h 14 min · Season 1 Episode 27Leilani Battle studies how software shapes what we see and believe. The University of Washington professor and co-director of the UW Interactive Data Lab talks with Michael…
- Curiosity, duty, and existential dread — with Joe Cheng · 1 h 5 min · Season 1 Episode 26Joe Cheng is the CTO of Posit and the creator of Shiny. He joins Michael and Hadley to talk about why he almost walked away from AI work entirely over ethics concerns and what it…
- Confidently Incorrect — with Caitlin Colgrove · 1 h 0 min · Season 1 Episode 25Caitlin Colgrove is the CTO of Hex, the data workspace for building and sharing data projects using SQL and Python that somehow counts a Sweetgreen chef as a power user. She…
- The Bothness of It — with Alex Hillman · 1 h 14 min · Season 1 Episode 24Alex Hillman built one of America's first co-working spaces, wrote a business book in tweets, and recently handed his inbox to a Claude Code agent — not to draft emails, but to…
- The Code Doesn't Lie — with Mike Bostock · 1 h 8 min · Season 1 Episode 23Mike Bostock made D3 when the browser was still a joke. He built bl.ocks when people needed somewhere to share their work. Now he's building Observable — reactive notebooks with…
- The Wonder-Driven Builder — with Paige Bailey · 46 min · Season 1 Episode 22Paige Bailey is a developer relations engineering lead at Google DeepMind. She's a geophysicist-turned-AI-engineer who was once told by her professors that building open-source…
- Widgets Are Lego Bricks (and Other Things People Are Sleeping On) — with Vincent Warmerdam · 1 h 15 min · Season 1 Episode 21Vincent Warmerdam has been the first full-time hire at a startup, a spacey punster who accidentally got himself a job, a bartender at an Amsterdam comedy theater, and a Dutch…
- Everything's a Fad (Including This Podcast) — with Benn Stancil · 1 h 35 min · Season 1 Episode 20Benn Stancil built Mode Analytics, spent a decade in the data trenches, and now writes some of the sharpest, funniest essays in the data world. On The Test Set, he talks about…
- Deeply Unsexy: SQL's Redemption Arc — with Tristan Handy · 1 h 5 min · Season 1 Episode 19dbt Labs CEO Tristan Handy drops into The Test Set to map the fault lines between the data science world and the enterprise data world — and explain why analytics engineers are…
- Your VP Is Doing a Rogue Analysis in Cursor Right Now — with Nell Thomas · 1 h 22 min · Season 1 Episode 18Nell Thomas has spent two decades in data — from equity research to the DNC to Facebook to leading a 400-person data org at Shopify. She walks Michael and Wes through the modern…
- Sleeping Rats and Sociopathic Agents — with Phillip Cloud · 56 min · Season 1 Episode 17Phillip Cloud has been shaping the Python data ecosystem since the early pandas days — and he has *opinions*. Now a principal engineer at NVIDIA leading the Ibis project, Phillip…
- More productive but a lot less fun — with Charlie Marsh · 1 h 35 min · Season 1 Episode 16Charlie Marsh built Ruff, uv, and Ty — the tools that mass-fixed Python's worst pain points. Now he's grappling with what happens when agents start writing most of the code. In…
- Alenka Frim: What yoga teaches us about discipline and collaboration in data science · 1 h 1 min · Season 1 Episode 15Alenka Frim went from teaching yoga full-time to becoming a committer and PMC Member on Apache Arrow. In this episode, Alenka joins The Test Set hosts to talk about how Arrow…
- Emily Riederer: Column selectors, data quality, and learning in public · 58 min · Season 1 Episode 14Emily Riederer writes Python with an R accent, and we’re all comfortable with it. In this episode, Emily reflects on her journey through R, Python, and SQL — from lessons learned…
- Rebecca Barter: Persistent learning, tool building, and ‘Will code even exist?’ · 57 min · Season 1 Episode 13Rebecca Barter, senior data scientist at Arine and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Utah, refuses to work on things she doesn’t care about. Lucky for us, she…
