Benjamin
Benjamin Gutzmann is a 32 year old Python/data engineer and maintainer of Wetterdienst, currently at Otto Group data.works (Data Engineer since 2023; previously Junior Data Engineer), working across Generative AI and data engineering on GCP with Python, SQL, Argo, and Terraform. He has built the Wetterdienst library at earth observations (hobby project, since 2018). Before his start into work life he has studied Hydrology (BSc, MSc) at TU Dresden.
Session
Weather and environmental data power analytics, ML, and operations—but APIs differ wildly and data prep is slow. Wetterdienst is a Python library that provides a unified, Polars‑first interface to multiple weather services (DWD, ECCC, EA, NOAA/NWS, Geosphere Austria, IMGW, Eaufrance, WSV, and more). It standardizes request patterns, returns tidy (long) data, converts to SI units, handles caching, timezones (UTC by default), and retries—so teams can focus on analysis instead of plumbing. This talk introduces Wetterdienst’s provider architecture, core request patterns, performance practices with Polars, and how to integrate via Python, CLI, or its REST API. We’ll walk through real examples (station discovery, parameter selection, timeseries retrieval), exporting to databases, and patterns for robust pipelines in ETL and ML.