Episode 9: with Tamara Atanasoska

We interviewed Tamara Atanasoska.

Tamara has been contributing to open source projects since 2012. She participated in Google Summer of Code to contribute to projects like Gnome and e-cidadania.

She is now a maintainer of Fairlearn, an open-source, community-driven project to help data scientists improve fairness of AI systems.

Hear how Django helps her feel empowered, and how the PyLadies Berlin community has helped her feel welcomed as a new immigrant in Germany.

In this episode, Tamara shares perspective about open source contributions, maintain, mentorship, and her experience in running beginner-friendly sprints.

Be sure to listen to the episode to learn all about Tamara’s inspiring story!

Topic discussed

• Introductions
• Getting to know Tamara
• Her role at :probabl.
• Her role as an open source maintainer for Fairlearn
• What is Fairlearn and discussion about fairness in AI
• The challenges in getting feedback from the users about the Fairlearn project
• How she get started with Python and Django
• Her political participation that led her to contributing to civic engagement open source project during Google Summer of Code
• How Django helps her feel empowered
• Her experience with hacker spaces
• How the Python and PyLadies Berlin community helps her feel welcomed as a new immigrant in Berlin
• How she gives back to the community by speaking, mentoring, and leading sprints
• How she approaches mentorship, and why it is part of her core values.
• Her ideas about leading beginner-friendly sprints
• Her future endeavors

Links from the show

• Fairlearn: https://fairlearn.org/
• Fairlearn Community Survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeOTRNgAc2RYnDDO5-GE7scMysPHrBLs8XV21ZP--XATr34aA/viewform
• :probabl.: https://probabl.ai/
• scikit-learn: https://scikit-learn.org/
• e-cidadania GitHub repository: https://github.com/cidadania/e-cidadania
• Google Summer of Code 2012: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2012/05/macedonia-google-summer-of-code-meetups.html
• PyLadies Berlin: https://berlin.pyladies.com/en/
• Tamara’s Substack: https://holophrase.substack.com/
• Tamara’s website: https://tamaraatanasoska.github.io/about/

Get to know Tamara Atanasoska

Tamara Atanasoska

Tamara is an open-source contributor and maintainer, a software engineer, and a CompLing/NLP researcher. Her expertise spans software engineering, ML/NLP, and areas including fair and responsible AI. She is a leader with proven track record of mentoring and fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.

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