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Eventually I got to the point in data analytics where keeping things in lists, or lists of lists, was no longer quite cutting it. My processing was slowly starting to grind to a halt, and things were getting way too abstract. I decided to call up a friend who had worked in the business longer than me, and they suggested “pandas.” I was vaguely familiar with it because users and clients had used it in the past. A “DataFrame” did sound like it would take care of a lot of my problems after reading the documentation casually… ...

Back when I first got hired at SHARCNET, I used a lot of Python. I mean a lot. This meant I quickly became the lightning rod for all Python-related questions and commentary. During a fun Friday chat, a colleague remarked that Python was, on average, 40x slower than C++. I defended my current language of choice, saying it was better than that, surely. To make a long story short, I was wrong. It really is about 40x slower depending on the problem. Determined to prove myself capable, and my language of choice a bit more defensible, I decided to look into ways to make Python faster. ...