Python Pandas creator Wes McKinney joins Posit

Python pandas creator Wes McKinney has joined Posit as a principal architect, a move that signals the company’s increasing seriousness about being a key player in the Python universe as well as the R ecosystem.

“I will advocate for the needs of the PyData ecosystem in Posit’s work as well as continue advancing critical open-source initiatives,” McKinney wrote in a blog post Monday. Along with being known for the pandas data analysis library, McKinney has worked on other open-source projects including Apache Arrow, Apache Parquet, and Ibis. He is also a co-founder of Voltron Data, which focuses on composable enterprise data systems.

McKinney’s move highlights a continued expansion of mission for Posit, a company once known as RStudio with a primary focus on the R programming language and its popular RStudio IDE. The company changed its name last year, pledging not to forsake R but to help data science practitioners and teams who use both R and Python.

In the last few years Posit has launched a Python version of its Shiny Web framework, unveiled the Quarto technical publishing platform that is equally friendly to R, Python, and Observable JavaScript, and promoted its Posit Connect enterprise data platform for collaboration and communication work in both R and Python.