[2024.12] Data Umbrella Newsletter: December 2024

We organize data science events for the community.

Dec 17, 2024

Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

Data Umbrella is on Bluesky!

We are on Bluesky as: dataumbrella.org. Follow us on this platform to get updates!

Data Umbrella: Milestones

Data Umbrella YouTube: 4000 subscribers in December! 🎉

Our YouTube channel hit 4000 subscribers this month!! Special thanks to the Data Umbrella team, our speakers and our community supporters for your support and spreading the word on our content!

Data Umbrella Turns 5! 🎂

Data Umbrella turned 5 on December 2. Happy Birthday to Data Umbrella!

Intro to Probabilistic Programming with PyMC by Austin Rochford hit 10K views on YouTube!!

Community News

Walmart Rolls Back DEI Programs

Walmart is ending some of its diversity programs, the latest big company to shift gears under pressure from a conservative activist. The retail giant will wind down Center for Racial Equity and prevent sellers from listing some LGBTQ-themed items on its website.

CodeYourFuture is an AI Opportunity Fund recipient.

Center for Public Impact has selected CodeYourFuture as a recipient of the Google.org AI Opportunity Fund! Read more to find out how CodeYourFuture plans to use the funding.

Source: CodeYourFuture on LinkedIn: CodeYourFuture is an AI Opportunity Fund recipient.

Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, going gray

The majority of open source project maintainers are not being paid for their work, spend three times as much time on security than they did three years ago, and have become less trusting of contributors following the xz backdoor

This Guardian article summarizes the state of open source maintainer as reported in the Tidelift 2024 State of the Open Source Maintainer Report.

In Memoriam: Thomas E. Kurtz, 1928–2024

The Computer History Museum gives tribute as the computing world bids goodbye to computer pioneer Thomas Kurtz, an American mathematician, computer scientist and co-inventor of the BASIC language.

JupyterLab 4.3 and Notebook 7.3 are available!

Jupyter Notebook 7.3.0 and JupyterLab 4.3.0 have been released. Read more to learn about the bug fixes, new feature and enhancements that have been made.

Source: Project Jupyter on LinkedIn: JupyterLab 4.3 and Notebook 7.3 are available!

Resources

Podcast: Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"

Check out this episode on Decoder with Nilay Patel as he talks about work, where we work, how our expectations of working remotely were radically changed by the pandemic, and how those expectations feel like they’re on the verge of changing yet again.

Timestamps

CONTRIBUTE TO TIMESTAMPS: We still have about a dozen videos which need timestamps. We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box or email us at info@dataumbrella.org.

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics:

Data Privacy
Data Engineering
Generative AI
Software engineering
Code quality

Email us if you are interested in speaking or have a speaker or topic suggestion: info@dataumbrella.org

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

Make Your Own JupyterLab Extension

January 7, 2025

Make your own JupyterLab extension in this tutorial. JupyterLab is a free and open source, browser based integrated development environment (IDE) that is the successor to Jupyter Notebook. Designed from the core to be extensible, JupyterLab is itself an extension of the Jupyter framework. Since its release, open source developers have contributed hundreds of third party extensions (652 third-party extensions as of 2024-10-15).

JupyterLab extensions can customize or enhance any part of JupyterLab. They can provide new themes, file viewers and editors, or renderers for rich outputs in notebooks. Extensions can add items to the menu or command palette, keyboard shortcuts, or settings in the settings system.

Videos

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

NOTE: Link to SLIDES are available in the video description.

Polars & Narwhals: Understanding Expressions When You're Used to pandas

When it comes to dataframes, pandas is the go-to library for many people. Yet Polars is taking the world by storm, and so many data practitioners are curious about trying it out. There is a learning curve though, as Polars introduces some concepts which pandas users might not be familiar with. This talk will be a deep dive into one of those concepts (expressions) and will focus on how you can understand them from a pandas perspective.

The lessons learned will be useful beyond Polars, as they will also enable you to use Narwhals. Narwhals is a lightweight and extensible compatibility layer between dataframe libraries which is gaining traction (Altair, Marimo, scikit-lego, and more are currently using it) - like Polars, its API is also based on expressions. By learning this concept, you will not only be able to use Polars efficiently, but you'll also know how to build dataframe-agnostic tools.

Introduction to Git

This is an introductory session on Git, the quintessential version control software used by developers to collaborate and manage projects. Discover some fundamental concepts, explore its practical applications, and learn how to efficiently use both the command line and the Visual Studio Code graphical user interface (GUI). Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting your coding journey, this webinar will equip you with essential skills.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

Data Umbrella Resources

Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.
We have a Job Board. You can post jobs (for free)
Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.