David Mertz bio

dqm-bio.txt

David is founder of KDM Training, a partnership dedicated to educating developers and data
scientists in machine learning and scientific computing. He created the data science training
program for Anaconda Inc. and was a senior trainer for them. With the advent of deep neural
networks he has turned to training our robot overlords as well.

He was honored to work for 8 years with D. E. Shaw Research, who have built the world's fastest,
highly-specialized (down to the ASICs and network layer), supercomputer for performing molecular
dynamics.

David was a Director of the PSF for six years, and remains co-chair of its Trademarks
Committee and of its Scientific Python Working Group. His columns, Charming Python and
XML Matters, written in the 2000s, were the most widely read articles in the Python world.
He has written previous books for Manning, Packt, O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley, and Lulu Press, 
and has given keynote addresses at numerous international programming conferences.

David is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

If I seem shortsighted to you, it is only because I have stood on the backs of midgets.

David is a past Director of the Python Software Foundation, and a longtime software developer in many languages. He has given technical keynote addresses in India, South Africa, Belarus, Cuba, UK, Russia, Estonia, UAE, Sweden, and even in the USA. Nowadays he is mostly a data scientist, and teaches our robot overlords be perceptive.

Safari Webinars

David Mertz is a data scientist, trainer, and erstwhile startup CTO, who has written the book Cleaning Data for Effective Data Science: Doing the other 80% of the work . He created the training program for Anaconda, Inc. He was a Director of the Python Software Foundation for six years and remains chair of a few PSF committees. For nine years, David helped with creating the world's fastest—highly-specialized—supercomputer for performing molecular dynamics.

David is founder of KDM Training, a partnership dedicated to educating developers and data
scientists in machine learning and scientific computing. He created the data science training
program for Anaconda Inc. and was a senior trainer for them. With the advent of deep neural
networks he has turned to training our robot overlords as well.

He was honored to work for 8 years with D. E. Shaw Research, who have built the world's fastest,
highly-specialized (down to the ASICs and network layer), supercomputer for performing molecular
dynamics.

David was a Director of the PSF for six years, and remains co-chair of its Trademarks
Committee and of its Scientific Python Working Group. His columns, Charming Python and
XML Matters, written in the 2000s, were the most widely read articles in the Python world.
He has written previous books for Manning, Packt, O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley, and has given
keynote addresses at numerous international programming conferences.

David is founder of Erudio LLC, a partnership dedicated to educating developers and data
scientists in machine learning and scientific computing. He created the data science training
program for Anaconda Inc. and was a senior trainer for them. With the advent of deep neural
networks he has turned to training our robot overlords as well.

He was honored to work for 8 years with D. E. Shaw Research, who have built the world's fastest,
highly-specialized (down to the ASICs and network layer), supercomputer for performing molecular
dynamics.

David was a Director of the PSF for six years, and remains co-chair of its Trademarks
Committee and of its Scientific Python Working Group. His columns, Charming Python and
XML Matters, written in the 2000s, were the most widely read articles in the Python world.
He has written previous books for Manning, Packt, O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley, and has given
keynote addresses at numerous international programming conferences.

For SEIU:

David's first, and fond, memories are of walking the boycott lines in support of UFW. Some years later than that, he chose to do his doctoral work in political philosophy at University of Massachusetts, in significant part because he knew of the incipient unionization drive by graduate employees, in which he became an organizer and in the leadership council, and steward once they won UAW District 65 recognition. After obtaining a doctorate, it dawned on him that US universities had moved to exploitative adjunct labor, and post-structuralism wasn't "where the money is."

Thence he became a software developer, for a while the world's most widely read writer about the Python programming language, meandered into creating several data science training programs for prominent companies, and published a bunch of programming books that each, like David Hume's great title, "fell stillborn from the press." Along that same winding path, David served as a Director of the Python Software Foundation for 6 years, still chairs several of its committees, and has had the honor to keynote at many international programming conferences, on topics both technical and political. He's was first a contractor for SEIU in 2008, but was full-time such during 2023.