Holden Karau is an open source engineer at Netflix. She is best known for her contributions to the Apache Spark open-source project and her work in the data science community. Holden started her career in software engineering, working on a variety of projects at IBM and Google. She later transitioned into data science, where she worked on machine learning and data analysis projects for various companies.

Holden is a co-author of numerous books, she is a frequent speaker at conferences and meetups, and she has taught data science courses for organizations such as Cloudera and IBM. Outside of software she enjoys playing with fire, welding, scooters, poutine, and dancing.

Check out Holden’s past talks:

• GOTO Chicago 2023 - Scaling Python for Machine Learning: Beyond Data Parallelism
• GOTO Chicago 2017 - Apache Spark Beyond Shuffling - Why it isn't Magic - but also where there is some really cool Magic

A few of Holden’s books:

• Learning Spark
• High Performance Spark
• Kubeflow for Machine Learning