Meet Austin Powell: Chatbots, Health, and Python
This post is part of a series introducing the speakers at the PyBay2018 conference in San Francisco this week! It’s a great chance to learn and connect with an engaged and diverse community of Python developers. We hope you’ll join us!
What are you going to be speaking about at PyBay2018, and why are you excited to give this talk?
There is a lot of hype around chatbots. I wanted to explore what is a necessary to make a minimal viable product in a conversation about your health. I wanted to start the project from scratch and seek answers to questions such as: What are the state of the art deep learning building blocks? What can be done using open-source data?
How did you get into programming and Python?
Of course I had the usual classes in programming as a part of my education, which included C++. Later in graduate school, I used R a lot because what statistician doesn’t love R? Once I started focusing on data science as a career, it became obvious for many reasons that Python was the language to focus on moving forward. One of the big ones is that Python is definitely a perfectly adequate solution to almost every solution regardless of the area of tech you work in.
What’s one of the features about Python you like the best?
It hits the sweet spot in being able to do almost any job some other specialized language can do without a huge compromise in most cases. As a data scientist who is usually worrying more about figuring out the right data solution, acquiring the right data, getting data into correct format, etc., having a unified coding language is very helpful.
What’s your favorite Python library (core or third-party), and why?
My favorite Python library is one that is well documented and clear. Generally speaking, my favorite Python library is the one that works for the job at hand. My current favorite library is Spacy. It can get help you get through some very challenge NLP problems with Pythonic style. It also has state-of-the-art performance on many NLP tasks.
What’s the coolest or most memorable thing that’s ever happened to you interacting with other Python devs?
Committing code for an open-source project and having other developers get excited about it.
What can you be found doing when you’re not writing code?
I’m a pretty avid runner and try to take advantage of all the amazing foot races and trails we have in the Bay Area whenever possible
What’s the best advice you’ve received as a Python developer?
Try and solve a really difficult problem from scratch, even if it has already been done before. You learn the most and grow the fastest when you struggle through a problem. It is also critical to place some sort of time-constraint on the project to help focus your work even more.
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