PyDev of the Week: Sunita Dwivedi

This week we welcome Sunita Dwivedi as our PyDev of the Week! Sunita works for the DISH Network. She is active with PyDEN, the Denver, CO Python users group as well as PyColorado.

Let's take some time to learn more about Sunita!

Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc):

I live by the phrase “A life not tried enough is not lived enough”. I don’t know who said it, may be I dreamt it. Just Kidding.

I love working in IT, Rock climbing is my favorite hobby and before COVID-19 I would host regular dinner parties and cook Indian food. I an active member in the tech community and Dev manager at Dish Networks

Why did you start using Python?

My interest in data analytics and data science lead me to Python. Being a high level language it was easy to learn python. Python requires proper indentation as part of the syntax — if you don’t use indentation correctly, your program won’t work. This makes it readable from the get go

Also Python has a large standard library plus thousands of open-source 3rd party libraries, which meant that I could develop code more with less effort, since many of the tools they needed, are ready to be plugged in and used.

What other programming languages do you know and which is your favorite?

I know c, c++, java and scala.

It is such a hard choice to pick a language. I feel each of the languages has its special powers.

Python is for the ease of use.

Scala is my favorite for compute heavy problems.

C is the first language I learned, it’s like first love, I am biased towards it.

Java is just is an all-rounder. You level of control one gets when coding is phenomenal

What projects are you working on now?

The current project I am working on is to consolidate customer data for my organization in one place. Create a customer master hub that provides a holistic view of customer from expense to orders to customer experience. I am using Springboot, aws and some python for this project

Which Python libraries are your favorite (core or 3rd party)?

Dask and pyspark libraries were fun to speed up data analytics processes.

Pandas is the most basic but such a great foundational library. It forced a lot of other languages to have a similar library.

How did you get into giving Python talks?

I went to lot of tech meetups when I was getting into python. Seeing so many people sharing knowledge, taking time from their schedule to help others out was inspirational. For all that I got to learn, made me realize the value of meetups. I also wanted to give back to this community that is so welcoming and helpful. So I decided to give Python and data science talks

Do you have any tips for people who would like to give technical talks?

You don’t have to be an expert in the language and be able to answer all questions. As long as you believe and know what you will share will benefit others, it is worth talking about. Also when prepping to give a talk, you learn more.

Is there anything else you’d like to say?

Whenever in doubt, reach out to someone who will support you as well as be a mirror of truth. We all have our moments when we need that little nudge and make sure you surround yourself with people who will do it for you

Thanks for doing the interview, Sunita!