The Test Set by Posit Alenka Frim: What yoga teaches us about discipline and collaboration in data science
Feb 9, 2026
Alenka Frim, a mathematician-turned-yoga teacher who became an Apache Arrow committer and PMC member, tells her unconventional path into core data infrastructure. She talks about discipline from the mat translating to steady open source contribution. Conversations cover Arrow’s role in the data ecosystem, managing thousands of issues, imposter syndrome, and how AI agents are reshaping programming.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Arrow As Invisible Data Infrastructure
- Apache Arrow is a memory format and spec that optimizes columnar data for fast analysis across languages and tools.
- It functions as infrastructure that many libraries and engines adopt to interoperate efficiently.
From Yogi To Arrow Contributor
- Alenka left professional computing to teach yoga for five years and returned during the pandemic to explore data work.
- She chose open source to learn and started contributing R bindings to Arrow through a friend's introduction and available grants.
Developers, Not End Users, Are Primary Users
- Arrow's primary users are developers building on the format rather than end users directly.
- Libraries like Pandas, DuckDB, and Polars adopt Arrow-compatible specs to gain interoperability and performance.
