AI at Anaconda with Greg Jennings

Anaconda is a software company that's well known for its solutions for managing packages, environments, and security in large scale data workflows. The company has played a major role in making Python based data science more accessible, efficient, and scalable. Anaconda has also invested heavily in AI tool development. Greg Jennings is the VP of engineering and AI at Anaconda. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to talk about the tooling ecosystem around AI app development, the Anaconda toolbox, the rapidly evolving role of AI and engineering, and more. Kevin Ball or Kay Ball is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He cofounded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI in action discussion group through Latent Space. Check out the show notes to follow Keball on Twitter or LinkedIn, or visit his website, keball.llc. Greg, welcome to the show. Hi, Kevin. Very nice to meet you. Yeah. Excited to have you on here. Let's maybe start with a little bit about you. Can you share some of your background and how you got involved with Anaconda? Sure. So I started as a graduate out of physics and material science out of graduate school and went to work at a large consulting organization where we were building sort of complex models and simulations for mostly government organizations to help them do things like figure out complex dependencies and procurement schedules and anticipate what the capabilities that they would gain from picking platform a versus platform b and balancing costs. And so though I hadn't had written mostly simulation code in graduate school, but I started writing a lot more, I guess, user facing code to kind of interact with end users and expose some of those capabilities to end users. So during my time there, I briefly found Python. We were writing things in Java Swing at the time. It was a painful experience. So we grew a team there, then ultimately decided along with a few other colleagues to set out and start to forge our path in a startup world as some people do and started to then explore Python. And so then at that point, stepping away, I really sort of dove into Python much more deliberately and found that I could be way more productive with it. Of course, some people have found that they love type languages for large projects. But for me, I'm trying to move very fast. It was extremely helpful to be writing in Python, and so I started writing a lot of things in Python. Even I found when I started doing consulting work that also leveraged my Java background, I would oftentimes write the algorithm in Python first and then port that algorithm over to Java. And I found that was actually faster to do very often. And the thing that I found that really made it faster to do …