Very proud to announce today that I had a pull request merged into the pandas library. In version 0.21, pandas will have a new feature: a way to read in line-delimited JSON in small pieces, which can be useful when working with large files or streams.

This is a fairly small change, technically, but a big deal for me.  Pandas is one of the most commonly used tools in the data science world. When I started at TrueAccord they bought me the book on pandas (Volume 2 coming out next month!). This was my first introduction to any programming language other than Stata, an odd proprietary language that languishes on among economists and epidemiologists. Now, writing software is a core part of my career.

Related, I highly recommend  The Success of Open Source, in which Steven Weber outlines the varied ways in which open source communities elicit and channel cooperation, and explores the complex set of motivations that leads people to contribute to open source.