How I Unknowingly Contributed To Open Source

Like many data scientists, I desired to contribute to open source, but I thought that "open source contribution" meant creating a new library in Python. That would require expertise in objects, inheritance, parallelism, asynchronous, classes, methods, decorators, and more to write that long, complex code. But, I'm a statistician and that level of Python/computer science is beyond my scope of knowledge. In early 2017, Andreas Mueller, who is the core maintainer of the Python analysis library scikit-learn and co-author of Introduction to Machine Learning with Python reached out to me, as an organizer for the NYC Women in Machine Learning & Data Science meetup group, to increase the participation of women in open source. A 2013 survey found that only 11 percent of open-source contributors were women. There is more background in this article: And Now, an Infuriating Statistic about Women and Coding.