Devin Petersohn
Devin Petersohn is a Software Engineer at Snowflake, focusing on dataframes and distributed systems. Prior to working at Snowflake, Devin did a PhD at UC Berkeley, where he created a dataframe project called Modin, and wrote his thesis on dataframes. Devin is passionate about making complex distributed systems more accessible, and has contributed to multiple open source projects.
Session
This lighthearted educational talk explores the wild west of dataframes. We discuss where dataframes got their origin (it wasn't R), how dataframes have evolved over time, and why dataframe is such a confusing term (what even is a dataframe?). We will look at what makes dataframes special from both a theoretical computer science perspective (the math is brief, I promise!) and from a technology landscape perspective. This talk doesn't advocate for any specific tool or technology, but instead surveys the broad field of dataframes as a whole.