Hacktoberfest 2017 Recap: joblib, conda-forge, python-lambda, and more

by Liz Sander and Jamie Michelson

At the beginning of October, Civis announced our involvement in Hacktoberfest. Here at Civis, we’re strong believers that the future of data science is based on open source software, which is largely built and maintained by volunteers in their free time. We are all beneficiaries of that work and want to do our part to maintain and support the open source ecosystem. Hacktoberfest is a month-long effort to get more people involved by contributing to open source software, and a bunch of us here at Civis are now proud to tell you about our contributions.

We had a number of engineers and data scientists contribute from across the company to a wide variety of projects. Special shout-outs to the four members of the team (see photo above: John Kerkstra, Aaron Smith, Liz Sander, and David Lewis) who contributed four (or more) pull requests during the month of October.

We have a number of significant contributions worth noting: On the data science side, Liz Sander split her time between R and Python, working to improve the documentation in the officer R automated reporting package and helping with the python pipelining package joblib! Matt Becker took a break from open-sourcing civis-compute to add a MySQL conda-forge recipe, which has received almost 500 downloads in the past 2 weeks!

Our data scientists were not alone in their contributions. Our engineers also made significant contributions to a number of open source repositories. John Kerkstra made a number of useful contributions to moto, an AWS mock testing library, including adding support for testing elastic load balancer autoscaling. Aaron Smith added S3 upload functionality to the python-lambda AWS toolset. David Lewis also stepped up to help the nteract project, helping out with both papermill and vdom.

During October we also open-sourced civis-compute and made a number of improvements (as well as some bugfixes) to our own open source projects as well. You can take a look on our GitHub!