Latest: Episode 22

The Wonder-Driven Builder — with Paige Bailey

Paige Bailey is a developer relations engineering lead at Google DeepMind, a geophysicist-turned-AI-engineer who was once told by her professors that building open-source libraries was a waste of time. We talk about her path from planetary science to TensorFlow, why statisticians have a hidden edge in the age of AI, and what it means to be a curious generalist when the cost of building software is approaching zero. Bonus: installing solar-powered silent-film birdhouses as street art in San Francisco.

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Episode 21

Widgets Are Lego Bricks (and Other Things People Are Sleeping On) — with Vincent Warmerdam

Vincent Warmerdam has been the first full-time hire at a startup, a Spacey punster who accidentally got himself a job, a bartender at an Amsterdam comedy theater, and a Dutch bike tour guide — and he'll tell you all of it was career development. Now doing DevRel at Marimo, Vincent makes the case for reactive notebooks, Lego-brick widgets, and why "number go up" is not a data science strategy. Also: chickens die. The model doesn't know. This matters more than you think.

Release date: 5 May 2026
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Episode 20

Everything's a Fad (Including This Podcast) — with Benn Stancil

Benn Stancil built Mode Analytics, spent a decade in the data trenches, and now writes some of the sharpest, funniest essays in the data world. On The Test Set, he talks about the cultural shift from Nate Silver to Rick Rubin why AI might kill the analytics dashboard, and what happens when a thousand startups all build the same thing. Plus: boy bands as a model for collaboration, and why the best creative work starts with cheating.

Release date: 20 April 2026
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Episode 19

Deeply Unsexy: SQL's Redemption Arc — with Tristan Handy

dbt Labs CEO Tristan Handy drops into The Test Set to map the fault lines between the data science world and the enterprise data world — and explain why analytics engineers are basically pissed-off data analysts who decided to organize the bookshelf. We get into SQL's glow-up, the community magic of dbt Slack, what AI agents mean for data warehouses, and why everyone's building iOS apps with Claude now.

Release date: 6 April 2026
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Data Scientist and Software Engineer at Posit, PBC

Michael Chow

Michael is a data science tool builder at Posit, where he works on open source tools for data analysis. He received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Princeton University, and is interested in what drives expert data science performance. When not wrangling data, you can find him in Philly writing tiny poems, baking bread, and embroidering.
Hadley Wickham Headshot
Chief Scientist, Posit

Hadley Wickham

Hadley is Chief Scientist at Posit PBC, winner of the 2019 COPSS award, and a member of the R Foundation. He builds tools (both computational and cognitive) to make data science easier, faster, and more fun. His work includes packages for data science (like the tidyverse, which includes ggplot2, dplyr, and tidyr)and principled software development (e.g. roxygen2, testthat, and pkgdown). He is also a writer, educator, and speaker promoting the use of R for data science.
Wes McKinney Headshot
Principal Architect, Posit

Wes McKinney

Wes McKinney is Principal Architect at Posit and an open source software developer focusing on analytical computing. He created the Python pandas project and is a co-creator of Apache Arrow, his current focus. He authored two editions of the reference book, Python for Data Analysis.