Vincent Warmerdam is a Research Advocate at Rasa, where he collaborates with the research team to explain and understand conversational systems better. One of his best-known projects is The Algorithm Whiteboard, a YouTube series that walks through NLP algorithms on a whiteboard, making the math behind machine learning visible one episode at a time. Before joining Rasa, he was a consultant who built production algorithms for a large range of companies, and he originally trained as a design student before pivoting into data science, a path that still shows in how clearly he communicates technical ideas.

Open source is where much of his energy goes. Vincent believes firmly in open source and is not shy about evangelizing it. He has created and maintains a collection of small, focused Python tools, including evol, clumper, whatlies, memo, and scikit-lego, and has contributed to the scikit-learn ecosystem. He also thinks hard about the health of open source itself, from maintainer burnout to governance and sustainable business models for ML tooling.

He shares the slightly less obvious aspects of data science on his blog at https://koaning.io, and he built https://calmcode.io to help people get started with Python and data tooling through short, calm video clips. The future is pretty awesome; all we have to do is build it.