PC-55199.yaml

# Talk details are specified in YAML files
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speaker_name: "Nicole Carlson"

talk_title: "Lessons learned open sourcing (and maintaining) my first library"

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talk_tags:
- "data science"
- "open source"
- "maintenance" 
- "documentation"
- "10 minutes"


talk_abstract: "Last year, I open-sourced my first library, PyMC3 Models. This talk has two parts: things I learned as I was writing my library and some of the issues I faced being the sole maintainer of the library. I hope you’ll be encouraged to open source and maintain your own library after this!"

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talk_details: |
  Last year, I open sourced my first library, PyMC3 Models, which features custom PyMC3 models built on top 
  of the scikit-learn API. This talk is about some of the things I learned along the way.

  The first half will focus on lessons learned while writing my library\: 
  - The importance of just starting: releasing even a small bit of work is worthwhile because it could help someone. 
  - Using toy examples: implementing a basic linear regression helped me improve the broader structure of my package. 
  - Documentation: Spending time on documentation was tedious in the beginning, but paid off in the long run. 
  - Copying: I borrowed heavily from other open source libraries and that’s totally ok!

  The second half will focus on being the sole maintainer of the library including: 
  - how to handle normal contributions 
  - strategies for dealing with aggressive contributors 
  - taking care of yourself when you’re the only one working on a library

  I hope this talk will encourage you to start your own library and give you some tools as you maintain it.




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about_author: |
  Nicole is on the data science team at ShopRunner. Previously, she worked at Shiftgig, the University of Chicago, 
  and the Exploratorium.

  She has a PhD in Physics from Berkeley; her research focused on computational neuroscience.

  You can find Nicole at PyLadies and PyData Chicago meetups or climbing at First Ascent in Chicago.

# web link will only show if about_author section is present
author_website: "http://parsingscience.com/"