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
Note
This episode was recorded in March 2025. Tamara is still a software engineer, but no longer works at probabl.
To find out more about what she is currently up to, check her LinkedIn profile.
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/