Meet Deborah & Sebastian Hanus: Voice Data, Deep Learning, and Python
This post is part of a series introducing the speakers at the PyBay2018 conference in San Francisco this weekend! 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 PyBay 2018, and why are you excited to give this talk?
We will speak about getting started with deep learning in Python, particularly for classifying vocal data, and discuss some of the challenges that Sebastian encountered when working on his first deep learning project. We are excited to share what we’ve learned so that we can make it easier for other people to get started with Deep Learning and Python.
How did you get into programming and Python?
S: A few years ago I attended a week long summer camp introducing the very basics of Python. From there I started learning more and honing my skills with both outside and personal projects.
D: I did it the “easy” way. When I majored in computer science at MIT, the classes were taught in Python, so I had to learn it whether I wanted to or not. But that said, now that I know Python, I am glad that I do!
What’s one of the features about Python you like the best?
S: Python’s concise syntax is my favorite feature. The ease of writing readable code makes it faster for me to familiarize myself with someone else’s code and easier to maintain my own.
D: I love Python’s community. Python has so many well-supported libraries that if you learn Python, you can make a website, write a game, analyze and plot data, or pretty much anything else that you want to do.
What’s your favorite Python library (core or third-party), and why?
S: The Dataset library makes it absurdly easy to use databases. As their page says, there was a time I knew that a database would be better than writing several JSON files, but I was too lazy to make that all work … until I found this library. Now my life is much easier, and my code looks much cleaner.
D: It’s so hard to pick just one! Getting started with Requests and NumPy utterly changed my programming life.
What’s the coolest or most memorable thing that’s ever happened to you interacting with other Python devs?
S: At PyCon 2018, I got to help teach a tutorial on web scraping and data analysis with all of my siblings!
D: While keynoting PyCon Colombia, I found at that one of my programming heroes, Naomi Ceder, and I share a homestate in the Midwest!
What can you be found doing when you’re not writing code?
S: I read documentation and write comments for my code. Just kidding! I also play video games, do TaeKwonDo, and work on all kinds of projects with my sisters.
D: I founded Sparrow, software that makes it easier for companies to provide leave for their employees, saving them time and money. Recently, most of my time has gone into that. When I am not working, I can be found blogging, speaking, trying to learn four languages at once, or finding ways to add matcha to everything I eat.
What’s the best advice you’ve received as a Python developer?
S: In the robotics club I founded with my sister, Patricia, we would often make changes to the code that would cause trouble later and cost us a lot of time, so we learned to keep detailed records of changes and save separate revisions. That has now given me the habit of committing often and writing meaningful commit messages so that I can find where a bug was introduced or an old section of code was removed.
D: “Start simple.” When I was learning how to code, I sometimes planned complicated projects, and then tried to code them all at once. It is much better to ask “What is the simplest possible version of this that I can build?” and then iteratively improve on that simple version of what you built.
That concludes this series introducing all the the PyBay2018 speakers! Check out the archive for more interviews. And if you haven’t already, make sure to get your pass for the conference. Hope to see you there!
