Wes McKinney: Part 1 Building Pandas, Arrow, and a speedrunning legacy
Wes McKinney's fingerprints are all over the modern data stack — from inventing Pandas to co-creating Arrow. But before all that, Wes was organizing speedrun communities and hacking together better ways to wrangle datasets in finance. In this conversation, he shares his origin story and what makes good tools good.
Episode notes
In this episode of The Test Set, we talk with Wes McKinney about the origin story of pandas, what he learned from the R ecosystem, plus his legacy as a community organizer for GoldenEye 007 speed runs (and how this shaped his approach to building tools).
We dig into the early days of open source Python, the evolution of pandas, and the rise of Arrow and Ibis. Wes also shares on community stewardship and the power of letting go.
What's Inside:
- How frustration with data work led Wes to build pandas (and leave a PhD)
- A nostalgic dive into the GoldenEye speedrunning scene
- Why read_csv performance is a deeply personal crusade
- Lessons from convincing friends to quit finance and go open source
- Founding startups, launching Arrow, and the Ibis origin story
- The beauty of letting contributors take the reins
- Shoutout to Philip Cloud, pandas’ resident pun master
- Why open communities win — and what it takes to build them
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