NumFOCUS

Coming tomorrow: Episode 4 of Give Me 5 Season 3, featuring a conversation between MK and Katrina Riehl! Subscribe to the PyData YouTube channel to be notified when the episode drops. Katrina Riehl embodies the idea of being an open-source contributor, maintainer, and community leader. She's spent years in NumFOCUS governance - Treasurer, then Board President, now Advisory Council member - giving her a rare inside view of what it takes to sustain open-source infrastructure. Her day job? She's currently Senior Manager for Python Numerical Libraries Engineering (cuPyNumeric) at NVIDIA, having previously led CUDA Education there, and has also had stints leading data teams at Snowflake, Cloudflare, Anaconda, and Expedia.

Project Update: Heat 1.9.0 helps you scale numerical code across distributed memory when your data outgrows a single workstation or GPU. If you know NumPy and scikit-learn, you already know how to use it.

Project Update: Optuna v5.0 introduces a new default sampler (TPE for both single- and multi-objective optimization), a native API for constrained optimization, and PED-ANOVA as the default for parameter importance.

Another episode of Give Me 5 is coming tomorrow! Join MK as he sits down with Ralf Gommers to talk about his journey into open source, and his thoughts on the future of the ecosystem. We'll see you tomorrow when Episode 3 drops. 👀 Ralf Gommers is a technical leader and long-time open-source developer, passionate about both the technology and people that drive innovation and keep it thriving over the long term. He's been an active maintainer of NumPy and SciPy for 15+ years, he created the Python Array API Standard, authored pypackaging-native, and currently maintains meson-python and contribute to PyTorch, Python packaging standards, and beyond.

Project Update: Julia 1.13.1, the first patch release in the 1.13 series, is now available. It contains bug fixes, documentation improvements, and performance improvements, with no new features or breaking changes.

Project Updates: GeoPandas 1.2.0 is out, headlined by a re-implemented static plotting system that remains mostly backward-compatible. Read the full release notes: hubs.la/Q04zk4hK0

Project Update: Polars now makes it simple to see what a query is doing. Add one line, pl.Config.enable_monitoring(), to profile any query, watch its progress, and find where to optimize.

Give Me 5 Season 3, Episode 2 is dropping TOMORROW, featuring Abby Tse! Abby Tse is currently an MBA student at Columbia and a former IBM engineer with a strong technical background. Beyond her engineering skills, Abby demonstrates leadership and community-building abilities as the chair of meetups in Boston and NYC, bringing people together and fostering valuable professional connections. Her combination of technical expertise, growth mindset, and leadership experience makes her a great fit for GM5. Subscribe to the PyData YouTube channel to be notified when Episode 2 drops.

Project Update: Python-Blosc2 4.13.1 makes working with remote data much easier. Remote arrays now default to lazy access, cached metadata allows instant warm reopens, and you can run cross-format computations across HDF5, Zarr, and B2Z directly in the cloud, all in a single expression. The release also adds native Windows on ARM64 wheels, human-readable disk cache directories, and direct local HDF5 reads via h5py. The team thanks the fsspec and kerchunk teams for their backend support.

Project Update: rOpenSci published its monthly news roundup, covering activity at and around the community. Read the September edition on their blog at hubs.la/Q04zk2Fl0