Mar 08, 2022

Meet Your Developer Advocates: Marlene Mhangami & Danielle Navarro

Stephanie Hazlitt

Headshots of Marlene Mhangami & Danielle Navarro

Join us in welcoming Marlene Mhangami and Danielle Navarro to our growing team at Voltron Data!

As significant contributors to the Apache Arrow open source project, the Voltron Data team, including Marlene and Danielle, wants to support tools, approaches and communities that build bridges across the data science and analytics ecosystem. Marlene and Danielle each bring tremendous experience, knowledge, and compassion for developing open source data science tools while enabling developers and users to get the most from data toolkits and to accelerate data analysis pipelines.

Marlene hails from Zimbabwe 🇿🇼 and is a strong community voice advocating for using data science and technology for social good and increasing diversity in these important fields. Co-founder of ZimboPy, a nonprofit organization that gives young Zimbabwean women access to resources in the field of technology, and a current director and vice-chair for the Python Software Foundation, Marlene brings her passion and skills for all things Python to Apache Arrow, Ibis and many other leading edge open source tools for leveraging data analytics workflows. Follow Marlene online and @marlene_zw on Twitter to join along in her journey with Apache Arrow.

Marlene writes:

Working with collaborative and welcoming open source communities is something that brings me so much joy! Voltron Data is creating a data science community that allows users from all languages to come together and build. Over the past few years I’ve loved being part of the Python community, but with the help of Apache Arrow I’m excited to expand that circle. Joining the Voltron Data community means I get to explore a more diverse array of programming languages and meet people from around the world. I’m thrilled to be a new Voltronaut and I’m looking forward to building with you!

Danielle calls Australia 🇦🇺 home and is a distinguished cognitive and data scientist, educator, open source R developer, and author. Danielle’s talent for writing, communicating and sharing their learning journey has made a tremendous contribution to the R community. Danielle is a co-founder of R-Ladies Sydney, coauthor of the ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis (3rd edition) book, a conference speaker, and a computational artist-making generative art using the R programming language. Follow Danielle online, @djnavarro on Twitter and on LinkedIn to take in all things Apache Arrow–add Instagram for a daily dose of beautiful generative art 🎨.

Danielle writes:

I’m so excited to be joining the Voltron Data community. I’ve been a strong believer in open source and open access for over 20 years now, and I absolutely adore the vision of an Arrow-native future where data scientists can work together across different programming languages and analyze data with heterogeneous hardware using the same code. I want to help create a data science world with no barriers to entry. I hope to foster a diverse and welcoming community that makes it easy for people from all walks of life to use the very best tools we can build. I’d love for you to join us in this journey! 🚀

You will hear from Danielle and Marlene on Voltron Data’s channels too, on Twitter and LinkedIn. In the meantime, we would like to know:

  • What kind of content would support you in your work using Apache Arrow?
  • How can we make contributing to Apache Arrow as delightful an experience as possible?
  • Are you passionate about contributing to grow the Apache Arrow ecosystem and accelerate analytical tools all around you?

Finally, Voltron Data is hiring for a number of engineering and data science roles–reach out to Danielle or Marlene to learn more about career opportunities with Voltron Data!