Meet William Horton: Open up your possibilities with CUDA and GPU programming
Greetings Pythonistas, we are less than a week away from PyBay2019! Check out our line up of speakers here. Join us for new connections, re-connections, fun, and learning. Stay up to date with advances in Python.
Here is William Horton. Join William in discussing increasing performance with CUDA and GPU programming.
What are you going to be speaking about at PyBay2019, and why are you excited to give this talk?
I’m going to be speaking about CUDA and GPU programming. I’m excited to give this talk because the performance enabled by GPU computing has opened up a ton of possibilities that we couldn’t realize with CPUs alone, for example the recent advances in deep learning. I think these alternative kinds of processors, GPUs and others, like TPUs and more, will only be growing in importance in the years to come.
How did you get into programming and Python?
My first formal introduction to programming was taking the CS50 Intro to CS course in college. But I didn’t get to write any Python at that point — most of the assignments were in C, with a bit of PHP and JavaScript sprinkled in at the end. I started writing Python a few months into my first job — up until that point I had been writing mostly JavaScript applications, but it was a small company so they wanted me to start helping with the data pipeline too. I fell in love with the language, and it’s been an increasing part of my roles ever since. At this point I’m working basically 100% in Python.
What’s your favorite Python library (core or third-party), and why?
My favorite Python library is PyTorch. PyTorch is an amazingly usable framework that helped me understand that I could build deep learning models as a software engineer. And there’s just a great community around it, both the framework itself and the whole ecosystem of other libraries and tools that has sprung up.
What can you be found doing when you’re not writing code?
When I’m not writing code, you can find me at home with my two cats. And if not there, then probably lifting at the gym.
What’s the best advice you’ve received as a Python developer?
Go to conferences! Seriously, it took me some time into my career to think I was ready to go to these kinds of events, and now that I’ve been to a few I wish I had started earlier. You meet some incredible people, and get to learn about the broader Python world outside of your work or your personal projects.
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