What's it going to take? Should you memorize the Pandas API? Should you read through the source code, line-by-line, file-by-file? Should you try to write your own Pandas from scratch?

Or could it be much simpler than that? Could there be an idea, a small, tiny idea, sitting there in plain sight; an idea so obvious that you may have overlooked it; yet an idea that unlocks the complexity of the tool?

In this talk, we'll discuss what Pandas really is, how it distinguishes itself from NumPy, and what the index and index-alignment are all about. And, through the lens of index alignment, we will see how to unlock the power of Pandas, how to understand the vagaries of the API, and how to create a simple framework for understanding all the many details of the tool, and motivate how deliberate, fluent use of indexing in Pandas is the one thing sitting between you and Pandas effective use for every day tasks.