Thijs Nieuwdorp
Thijs Nieuwdorp is the Lead Data Scientist at Xomnia in Amsterdam. His interest in the interaction between human and computer led him to an education in Artificial Intelligence at the Radboud University, after which he dove straight into the field of Data Science. At Xomnia he witnessed the birth of Polars as Ritchie Vink started working on it during his employment there and has been using it in his projects ever since. He enjoys figuring out complex data problems, optimizing existing solutions, and putting them to good use by implementing them into business processes. Outside work Thijs enjoys exploring our world through hiking and traveling, and exploring other worlds through books, games, and movies. He lives in Amsterdam with his partner, Paula.
Session
Ever been burned by a mysterious slowdown in your data pipeline? In this session, we'll reveal how a stealthy performance regression in the Polars DataFrame library was hunted down and squashed. Using git bisect, Bash scripting, and uv, we automated commit compilation and benchmarking across two repos to pinpoint a commit that degraded multi-file Parquet loading. This led to challenging assumptions and rethinking performance monitoring for the Python data science library Polars.