Hi Zarr Community! My name is Sanket Verma and I’m excited to share that I’m the new Community Manager for the Zarr project. I hail from New Delhi, India. I’m so excited to be part of this wonderful community and look forward to working with all of you.

Zarr steering council consists of wonderful humans and I’m thankful for the smooth interview and onboarding process. I’d like to mention and thank Josh Moore, Alistair Miles and John Kirkham for smooth onbarding and interview.

A bit about myself, I graduated from Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi with a major in Computer Science & Engineering. I’ve been heavily involved with the PyData ecosystem and have been super active with the community building and fostering of PyData culture throughout the Indian region. PyData Delhi organised the first PyData conference in India back in 2017 which led to the foundation of many new PyData chapters throughout the country. Since 2017, I have chaired 3 PyData Delhi conferences and organised 40+ meet-ups throughout Delhi-NCR. I’ve also had the generous opportunity to be the Executive Chair for the PyData Global 2020 and 2021 conferences. I’ve been involved with NumFOCUS for a long period and have recently been awarded NumFOCUS Community Leadership Award for my efforts.

In the past, I’ve worked on several interesting things. I worked as a Research and Development Engineer at Forensic Science Lab, Government of India where I developed software for the Ballistics department which helped the authorities in the accelerated prosecution of criminals.

A brief about my research: Every firearm imparts a unique fingerprint to every bullet and shell fired from it. These fingerprints are known as striations and riflings. The software we developed essentially compares the microscopic images of bullets and shells obtained from the different crime scenes and matches them for similarity. If the evidence(images) from different crime scenes matches with each other then we can evidently and factually say that the same firearm was used in the crimes involved. After analysing the additional evidence we could safely say that the criminal cases were linked to each other.

After that, I was involved with a startup where we developed assistive tech for differently-abled. I also have experience working with a multinational organisation in a research position where I made production-ready software in the field of NLP. Recently, I worked with an organisation where I worked on adding NLP features to their product. I also helped them in organising community events and advising the product team to align the development of their product for better adoption by OSS communities.

Why did I join Zarr?

Throughout my career, I was involved with working on technical projects, research and community building which I think are bigger than myself. I’ve always loved to work on things that help others and give back to society. Open-source and communities are such places where you have this wonderful privilege to help others and make tools for a better tomorrow. I also believe that in open-source, individual contributions does not only help you but also others on their journey.

Zarr seemed like a perfect place for me to work on what I believe. I think being a young project Zarr needed someone with experience in handling and working with the communities.

Thanking CZI

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was founded in 2015 to help solve some of society’s toughest challenges - from eradicating diseases and improving education, to addressing the needs of our local communities. The founding annual letter from the founders of CZI is worth a read as it highlights compelling thoughts on how working collaboratively towards a better tomorrow is everyone’s moral responsibility.

The EOSS is one of the CZI’s divisions that supports the maintenance, growth, development and community engagement of critical open source tools. In total there have been 4 funding cycles for EOSS and Zarr has been the recipient of grants in the 1st and 4th cycles. The 1st cycle was led by Ryan Williams and 4th by Josh Moore. The community manager position is being funded by EOSS’s 4th funding cycle. More about the funding.

I’d like to wholeheartedly thank CZI for considering Zarr as one of the Essential Open Source Software for Science. Zarr has been a crucial open-source software for scalable storage of data for medical, scientific and enterprise applications. Utilising the resources from CZI we’d ensure to match the standards w.r.t. to the needs of the community while being language agnostic along with transparency and reproducibility.

Hobbies & Interests

Apart from technical and community engagements I love to read sci-fi, cosmology and fantasy books. I’m also a huge Marvel fan(comics and movies). I like thrillers, horror, sci-fi and fantasy movies and T.V. shows. I’m blessed to be not far from the magnificent Himalayas and go on mountain treks a few times a year. To keep up with my trekking fitness, I run and cycle.

Roadmap

It’s more than a week since I officially joined Zarr as a community manager. I have been talking regularly with the steering council, reading about the project, going through the Github repos and have planned a few things for upcoming months:

and much more! I’ll be writing a separate blog for Zarr’s roadmap in a few weeks and the status of my progress.

I look forward to interacting and working with all of you. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me with any questions/comments or maybe some good memes! 😏

I’m on Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIN. You can also email me at svsanketverma5@gmail.com.

You’ll be hearing from me soon. Until then, Adios! ✌🏻

~Sanket Verma