2025-09-26 –, Orbit
Also this year, at our 10 year anniversary edition of PyData Amsterdam, we’ll host open source sprints! ️ Our open source sprints this year will be 2 sessions in parallel, with leading open source contributors Fokko Driesprong and Rob Zinkov of the respective packages PyIceberg and PyMC.
What is an open source sprint?
An open source sprint is an event where programmers come together to make focused contributions to an open source project within a limited timeframe. Participants can work individually or in groups, collaborate directly on coding tasks, fix bugs, and develop new features for the project. The sprint environment offers hands-on coding, mentorship from experienced contributors, and fosters networking and community building among peers. Through time-boxed sessions, programmers can learn from each other, solve problems collaboratively, and quickly advance project goals in a welcoming, supportive setting.
Why should you join?
- Gain practical coding experience on real-world projects
- Receive guidance and mentorship from skilled contributors
- Make a meaningful impact on an open source project
- Expand your professional network and meet like-minded peers
- Learn best practices and new technologies in a supportive environment
Rob Zinkov is a machine learning engineer and data scientist. My work covers how to more efficiently specify and train deep generative models as well as how to more effectively discover a good statistical model for your data. I am Principal Data Scientist at PyMC Labs. Previously I was a research scientist at Indiana University where I was the lead developer of the Hakaru probabilistic programming language.
Fokko Driesprong is a Staff Open Source Software Engineer at Databricks. He is an Apache Software Foundation member and serves as a committer and PMC on major Apache projects; Avro, Parquet and Iceberg. He's one of the original authors of PyIceberg, a pure Python library to query Iceberg tables, which has over 400k daily downloads. He studied distributed systems at the University of Groningen and now specializes in building scalable cloud-based data pipelines and analytics solutions.