Highlights From The 2019 Nairobi Wimlds Scikit Sprint

4 min readJul 1, 2019

Sprint Repo

The 1st Annual Nairobi WiMLDS / Scikit Sprint was held on Saturday, June 22nd at iHub in Nairobi. This is our repository for all items related to the 2019 Nairobi WiMLDS Scikit Sprint. This collated Twitter Moment on Nairobi Sprint has highlighted tweets from the event.

Organizer Acknowledgements

Reshama Shaikh, for initiating the sprint, finding a contributor and sponsors and organizing and managing the event all the way from New York City. Her experience organizing the 2017 and 2018 NYC sprints was very helpful.

Adrin Jalali, core contributor of scikit-learn for flying down from Berlin to facilitate this event, here is his blog about the sprint.

Andreas Mueller, for assisting in organizing the sprint and covering some funding.

Lawrence Muthoga, our Microsoft 4Afrika liaison who arranged the food.

Agnieszka Kaminska, Poznan WiMLDS organizer for designing the sprint website.

Cecelia Shao, NYC WiMLDS member for assisting with the website.

Caroline Chavier, Paris WiMLDS for assisting with social media.

Sponsor Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following sponsors for making this sprint possible:

Microsoft 4Afrika: for sponsoring delicious food and snacks throughout the day.
iHub: for providing the space.
O’Reilly Media: for providing the books for the raffle.

History of Scikit-Learn Python Library

This project was started in 2007 as a Google Summer of Code project by David Cournapeau. Later that year, Matthieu Brucher started work on this project as part of his thesis.

In 2010 Fabian Pedregosa, Gael Varoquaux, Alexandre Gramfort and Vincent Michel of INRIA took leadership of the project and made the first public release, February the 1st 2010. Since then, several releases have appeared following a ~3 month cycle, and a thriving international community has been leading the development.

This is how Andreas Mueller became involved in scikit-learn:

“While working on my Ph.D. in computer vision and learning, the scikit-learn library became an essential part of my toolkit. I was an ardent user of the library, and I wanted to partake in its advancement. My initial participation in open source began in 2011 at the NIPS conference in Granada, Spain, where I had attended a scikit-learn sprint. The scikit-learn release manager at the time had to leave, and the project leads asked me to become release manager; that’s how it all got started.”

Read more in this interview with Andreas Mueller.

Advertising the Sprint

A few weeks before the sprint, we still had about 30 spots open. The below tweet reached so many scikit-learn users that it ensured that all spots were taken.