Episode 15

Alenka Frim : What yoga teaches us about discipline and collaboration in data science

Alenka 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 grew from spec to critical infrastructure, and why she started contributing to a project she had never even used. She reflects on imposter syndrome, the discipline of showing up (on the mat and in GitHub), and how agents are changing what it means to write code. Plus: managing 4,000 open issues without losing your mind.

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EPISODE NOTES

Alenka's path into Arrow is unconventional: She wasn't looking for a job, she wasn't using the tool, and she'd spent the previous five years focusing on mind-body fitness. But open source felt like the right place to learn, have fun, and figure things out, so she jumped in. What followed was a journey from her first R bindings to becoming a PMC member on one of the most critical pieces of data infrastructure in the world.

What's Inside:

Alenka's journey, from yogi to Arrow committer
Signs of a healthy open source community: people, dialogue, and turnover
Arrow as critical infrastructure: DuckDB, Polars, Pandas, and the spec that unifies them
Managing 4,000 open issues without losing your mind
Imposter syndrome in open source
What the yoga mat teaches you about discipline and collaboration
AI and the future of programming: 100x more software or 10x better software?