December 10, 2017

Kenneth Reitz

42 minutes

Summary

Kenneth Reitz has contributed many things to the Python community, including projects such as Requests, Pipenv, and Maya. He also started the community written Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python, and serves on the board of the Python Software Foundation. This week he talks about his career in the Python community and digs into some of his current work.

Preface

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Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Kenneth Reitz about his career in Python

Interview

Introductions

How did you get introduced to Python?

An overarching theme of your open source projects is the idea of making them “For Humans”. Can you elaborate on how that came to be a focus for you and how that informs the way that you design and write your code?

What are the projects that you are most proud of and which do you think have had the biggest impact on the Python community?

A: Requests, Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python, and Pipenv (yet to come to full fruition).

Which projects have you authored which are relatively unknown but you think people would benefit from using more often?

A: Maya: Datetime for Humans, and Records: SQL for Humans.

Outside of the code that you write, what are some of your personal missions for the software industry in general and the Python community in particular?

A: I consider myself a “spiritual alchemist”, which means “transformation of dark into light”. I seek to do “the great work”, in however in manifests, outside of the programming world, as well as within it.

What do you think is the biggest gap in the tool chest for Python developers?

A: I seek to fill all the voids that I see, and I’ve done my best to do that to the best of my ability. I think we have a lot of work to do in the area of single-file executable builds (a-la Go).

What are your ambitions for future projects?

A: At the moment, I have no current plans for future projects, but I’m sure something will come along at some point

If you weren’t working with Python what would you be doing instead?

A: I’d have a lot less money and I’d be a lot less fufilled.

Keep In Touch

Website

@kennethreitz on Twitter

kennethreitz on GitHub

Picks

Tobias

Algorithms to Live By

Kenneth

The Linux Programming Interface

Links

Heroku

Salesforce

PSF Board of Directors

Caldera Linux

Pascal

Basic

Groovy

Java

PHP

Ruby

The Design of Everyday Things

Requests

Hitchhiker’s Guide

Pipenv

Pipfile

The Update Framework

Falsehoods Programmer’s Believe About Time

PEP20

Py2EXE

Cxfreeze

Briefcase

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

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By Tobias Macey

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