Holden KarauInterview
Open source developer (Apache Spark)
Adapted from Holden Karau's interview on Uses This, published 26 June 2025. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
In my personal life I use a Framework laptop (love the idea of upgradable) with a 12th gen Intel i7-1260 and 64gb RAM.
My desktop is Ryzen 9 with an RTX 4090 for model inference (and it also runs my 4 monitors).
My non-work cluster is a mix of ARM and x86 machines (from Raspberry Pi to Jetson AGX).
The upstream on my home network are Sonic (local fiber ISP), Monkey Brains (local wireless ISP), and a small capped T-Mobile backup (with a Netgear M5).
For model training I've used LambdaLabs w/ A100s.
Our 3D printer is a VORON 2.4.
Communication
My happiness on a daily basis is probably index to my % of time spent in Emacs and outside vs in Gmail/Meet.
Productivity
Coding & Development
Other
I'm Holden Karau, I work on open source big data tools (mostly Apache Spark) for my day job.
At my day job I mostly use a ThinkPad w/32gb RAM along with an EC2 instance for compiling multiple versions of Spark at the same time.