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The Python Podcast.__init__ episodes
- Griatch on Evennia (Making MUDs with Python)
Visit our site to listen to past episodes, sign up for our mailing list and support the show.
SummaryGriatch is an incredibly talented digital artist, professional astronomer and the maintainer of the Evennia project for creating MUDs in Python. We got the opportunity to speak with him about what MUDs are, why they’re interesting and how Evennia simplifies the process of creating and extending them. If you’re interested in building your own virtual worlds, this episode is a great place to start.
Brief Introduction- Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
- Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS
- Follow us on Twitter or Google+
- Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+
- I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at
- We are recording today on September 15th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
- Today we are interviewing Griatch about the Evennia project
Interview with Griatch- Introductions
- How did you get introduced to Python?
- Can you explain what MUDs are and what that has to do with Evennia?
- What is it about MUDs that keeps them interesting long after the technical restrictions that led to their creation are no longer present, especially in light of 3D multiplayer games like WoW and EVE Online?
- Can you give us a rundown of the various parts of Evennia (MUD engine, web interface, etc.) and how they fit together?
- How does Evennia handle the fact that a MUD world is comprised of many hundreds of objects containing various properties, maintaining consistent, persistent state as players interact with them?
- What concurrency tools or paradigms does Evennia use?
- During the height of MUDs popularity, one highly sought after feature was the idea of being able to have players travel from one MUD instance to another, would it be possible to implement this in Evennia?
- Has the Evennia core team given any thought to adding features to support a richer client interface? Graphical maps or the like?
- How difficult would it be to use Evennia to interface with something like Slack or Hipchat for a company-wide MUD? Have you ever heard of someone doing something like that?
- Are there any fully fledged running MUDs built with Evennia out in the wild?
Picks- Tobias
- libraries.io
- jsonapi.org
- Marshmallow Marshalling Library
- Chris
- The End of All Things
- David’s Tea Steeper
- Hello Webapp – Intermediate Concepts
- Griatch
- F2Py
- Designing Virtual Worlds
- Imaginary Realities
- Optional Realities
Keep In Touch- Evennia Website
- Evennia Github
- Freenode IRC Channel #Evennia
Links- roll20
1 hr 15 min - Hylang Core DevelopersWe got the chance to talk to some of the core developers of Hylang, which is a Lisp dialect that runs on the Python VM! We talked about how it got started, how it works and why you should try it. Of particular interest is our discussion about using Hylang to backport language features, or create entirely new ones due to the power of Lisp and the Python AST (Abstract Syntax Tree). If you need to level up your Lisp knowledge, they gave us a great list of references to help out.56 min
- Hylang Core Developers
Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list
SummaryWe got the chance to talk to some of the core developers of Hylang, which is a Lisp dialect that runs on the Python VM! We talked about how it got started, how it works and why you should try it. Of particular interest is our discussion about using Hylang to backport language features, or create entirely new ones due to the power of Lisp and the Python AST (Abstract Syntax Tree). If you need to level up your Lisp knowledge, they gave us a great list of references to help out.
Brief Introduction- Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
- Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS
- Follow us on Twitter or Google+
- Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+
- I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at
- We are recording today on August 27, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
- Today we are interviewing Paul Tagliamonte, Tuukka Turto, and Morten Linderud
Interview with Hylang Developers- Introductions
- How did you get introduced to Python?
- Before we get too far along can you explain what Hy is?
- What inspired you to create Hy?
- What do you recommend as reference material for Python developers to gain familiarity with idiomatic Lisp?
- What are some of the problem domains where implementation becomes easier or more elegant as a result of Hy’s LISP syntax?
- Given the ability to create powerful macros in Lisp, could Hy be used as a way of prototyping or backporting new language features in Python?
- What are some of the most challenging and interesting problems you encountered bringing an alternate syntax to the Python runtime?
- While playing around with the Hy REPL I noticed that it does visual matching of parentheses when closing an expression. What other niceties have been included in the REPL?
- What are your thoughts on adding autocompletion to the REPL as a way of encouraging discovery and exploration of the Hy language?
- Which LISP variant is Hy most similar to, and why?
- How does garbage collection work in Hy, and why?
- How hard would it be to port existing LISP packages to Hy like MACSYMA or CLOS?
- What kind of overhead in terms of runtime performance and memory usage does Hy impose? Has this been a challenge in Hy’s development?
- What are some of the most innovative uses for Hy that you have seen or created?
- What does the future hold for Hy?
- I noticed that there are a large number of core contributors to Hylang and I’m curious how you determine what features to work on?
Picks- Tobias
- Displacy
- The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker – Read it on Scribd
- Safari Online
- Chris
- Dash and Zeal
- Reasonably sound (podcast)
- PBS Idea Channel (Youtube)
- Paul
- Reproducible Build Project
- Model View Culture
- Tuukka
- SICP Lecture
- F#
- ReactiveX
- 1 Game Per Month (#!GAM)
- Morten
- Hackers
- Mr. Robot
Keep In Touch- Paul
- Twitter
- paultag on IRC
- Website
- Tuukka
- Twitter
- Morten
- Twitter
Links- Core features of Hylang
- Adderall – minicanron in hylang
- Books
- Joy of Clojure
- Let over Lambda
- Land of Lisp
- Clojure programming
- Herculeum – Tukka’s DSL for roguelikes
- Pixie – Lisp in RPython
- Dogelang
- BPython
- Github trending repos with Hylang
- Pineal
- hydiomatic – Algernon
56 min - Bryan Van de Ven on BokehBryan Van de Ven is the project maintainer for Bokeh, a plotting and visualization toolkit that allows Python developers to easily create attractive interactive visualizations for the web. We talked about the project’s history, some interesting use cases for it, and what its near future looks like. Bryan also told us about how Bokeh compares to some of the other visualization libraries in both Python and Javascript, as well as how to use Bokeh from other languages such as Scala and Lua.58 min
- Bryan Van de Ven on Bokeh
Visit our site to listen to past episodes, subscribe to our mailing list, and donate to the show.
SummaryBryan Van de Ven is the project maintainer for Bokeh, a plotting and visualization toolkit that allows Python developers to easily create attractive interactive visualizations for the web. We talked about the project’s history, some interesting use cases for it, and what its near future looks like. Bryan also told us about how Bokeh compares to some of the other visualization libraries in both Python and Javascript, as well as how to use Bokeh from other languages such as Scala and Lua.
Brief Introduction- Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
- Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS
- Follow us on Twitter or Google+
- Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+
- I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at
- There is a new Python podcast that just started up recently! It’s called the Python Test Podcast and covers the world of testing in Python, so go ahead and give it a listen. You can find it at
- We are recording today on Aug 18th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
- Today we are interviewing Bryan Van de Ven about the Bokeh project
Interview with Bryan Van de Ven- Introductions
- How did you get introduced to Python?
- For our listeners who aren’t familiar with what Bokeh is, can you describe it?
- What inspired you to create Bokeh?
- Bokeh has integrations with some of the other Python graphing libraries such as matplotlib and seaborn. I can see how this would be useful to easily update existing code to publish visualizations on the web. Are there other use cases for these integrations?
- I noticed that Bokeh has bindings for some languages other than Python. R and Julia are obvious candidates due to their strong focus on analytics work, I’m curious what made you choose Scala and Lua as languages worth targeting?
- Do you lose any capabilities using the javascript library by itself?
- Other than the sample data sets that come with Bokeh, can you suggest a good publicly available data set with accompanying tutorial for people who want to get started with data visualization using Bokeh?
- Can you provide some comparisons between D3.js and the Bokeh javascript library in terms of capabilities and performance?
- The Bokeh project has a server component that allows for streaming data to clients. Can you describe the architecture of that and some example uses for it?
- Why was the server written as a Flask blueprint as opposed to making it a component of another framework such as Django or Pyramid and how difficult would it be to port the functionality to another system?
- What’s the most interesting use of Bokeh you’ve seen?
- Are you aware of any projects in other languages that are comparable to Bokeh?
Picks- Tobias
- wappalyzer
- The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
- Chris
- Edward Snowden Meets the IETF
- Between the World and Me
- Untapp’d
- Bryan
- Audiobooks
- Scribd – Subscription service for ebooks and audio books with a great selection
- Try Audible and Get Two Free Audiobooks
- Cartographies of Time
- The Post-Modern Jukebox
Keep In Touch- Twitter
- Mailing List
- Bokeh Web Site
Links- vispy
- Vincent
- vega
- D3.js
- nbviewer.org bokeh page
- million song dataset
- data.gov
- ggplot / ggvis
- mathematica
58 min - Jessica McKellarWe got the chance to talk to Jessica McKellar about her work in the Python community. She told us about her experience as a director for the PSF, working as the diversity outreach manager for PyCon, and being a champion for improving the on-boarding experience for new users of Python. We also discussed perceptions around the performance of Python and some of the work being done to improve concurrency, as well as her work with OpenHatch.52 min
- Jessica McKellar
Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show and sign up for our mailing list.
SummaryWe got the chance to talk to Jessica McKellar about her work in the Python community. She told us about her experience as a director for the PSF, working as the diversity outreach manager for PyCon, and being a champion for improving the on-boarding experience for new users of Python. We also discussed perceptions around the performance of Python and some of the work being done to improve concurrency, as well as her work with OpenHatch.
Brief Introduction- Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
- Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS
- Follow us on Twitter or Google+
- Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+
- I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at
- We are recording today on Aug, 12 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
- Today we are interviewing Jessica McKellar
Interview with Jessica McKellar- Introductions
- How did you get introduced to Python?
- Attended MIT, originally for Chemistry
- Had friends pursuing CS degrees
- Toolset and skills seemed worth investingating
- Led to BA and MS
- MIT was in transition from LISP to Python
- Can you describe what your responsibilities are as a director of the PSF?
- A lot of outreach and investment in the community
- Do you think the PSF does a good job of making people aware of what it is, what it does for the community, and how they can help?
- Struggled with this historically but has gotten better in recent years
- Website re-design has helped
- A large focus of your work in the community has been around improving the experience of users who are new to Python and programming in general and I noticed that you just received the Frank Willison Memorial Award for your contributions to outreach and education in the Python community. What is your motivation behind this particular focus?
- Great deal of empathy for newcomers due to personal history
- Knowing how to program changes how you think about the world
- Has the situation for newcomers running Windows who wish to try Python gotten any better since your keynote at Kiwi PyCon?
- Some vaguaries of setup have gotten better with recent versions (e.g. setting path variables)
- Ruby has in-browser tutorial to get people hooked
- Do “Batteries Included’ distributions like Anaconda help or is it the same problem of visibility you discussed in your talk?
- Informatino flow / what are you default options question
- We could be much more opinionated about this
- You have presented a number of times about the future of Python and how we can all help to make sure that story is a happy one. How has the material for that talk changed over the past few years?
- As a largely volunteer community, how to maximize the impact of the bandwidth that we have
- Focus on the ‘top of the funnel’ to win over new users
- Python has the steepest positive curve of any language
- Community should invest in AP high school Python curriculum
- What do you anticipate will be the talking points for this topic over the next few years?
- We need to be smart about which areas we invest in to ensure success e.g. mobile, web, desktop.
- If you could grade the Python community on how well they have listened to and acted on the calls to action in your talks over the past few years, what would you give them?
- Rallying large groups of volunteers is a hard problem
- We need to think about commercial partnerships in key areas
- In your Kiwi PyCon talk you mentioned Kivy as an example of a great way to do mobile software development in Python. It feels to me like the Kivy team are still not getting the community involvement and buy in they should. How can we help make Kivy the mobile app development platform of choice for beginners?
- This will be a tough battle because Python is not the default platform for mobile compared to Java for Android, Objective C, Swift
- Users vote with their feet depending on what provides the most value to them
- Opportunity for a virtuous cycle here
- Game development as an entree to programming has been a recurring theme on our podcast. Has the Python game dev scene improved at all since 2013? And do you still see the same pitfalls holding people back (like app packaging), or have we moved on to different problems?
- The problems are largely the same
- Status quo still feels pretty broken
- Creative experiments around this definitely make sense for the community
- KivEnt could be a win here because Kivy apps are free standing binaries and require no dependencies.
- What do you view as the biggest threats to the popularity of Python currently and what can we do to address them?
- Other languages gaining popularity where Python has historically been strong (e.g. server-side development)
- A lot of this may be a perception issue
- May be largely a marketing problem
- I understand that you were involved in the formation of the Open Hatch organization. Can you describe what Open Hatch does and how our listeners can get involved?
- Non-profit dedicated to lowering barriers to entry for open source contribution
- Host workshops in colleges, underserved communities, etc.
Picks- Tobias
- F.lux
- Lightyear.fm
- PEP 0401
- Chris
- The Alex Verus Series by Benedict Jacka
- Rick Dillon’s Org-mode structure manipulation tutorial
- Dominion
- Jessica
- Reply All Podcast
- RFC 959 – original FTP RFC
- Go read some RFCs!
- Think Stats
Keep In Touch- Google for “Jesstess”
Conference Presentations- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI_RPSbsRw8&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p-FecWny_Q&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH9KJBr_R1Q&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1a4Jbjc-vU&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
52 min - Static Site Generators with Justin Mayer and Roberto AlsinaIn this episode we had the opportunity to discuss the world of static site generators with Roberto Alsina of the Nikola project and Justin Mayer of the Pelican project. They explained what static site generators are and why you might want to use one. We asked about why you should choose a Python based static site generator, theming and markup support as well as metadata formats and documentation. We also debated what makes Pelican and Nikola so popular compared to other projects.1 hr 33 min
- Static Site Generators with Justin Mayer and Roberto Alsina
Visit our site to listen to past episodes, comment on the show or find out more about us.
SummaryIn this episode we had the opportunity to discuss the world of static site generators with Roberto Alsina of the Nikola project and Justin Mayer of the Pelican project. They explained what static site generators are and why you might want to use one. We asked about why you should choose a Python based static site generator, theming and markup support as well as metadata formats and documentation. We also debated what makes Pelican and Nikola so popular compared to other projects.
Brief Introduction- Welcome to Podcast.__init__ the podcast about Python and the people who make it great
- Follow us on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn
- Give us feedback on iTunes, Twitter, email or Disqus
- We donate our time to you because we love Python and its community. If you would like to return the favor you can send us a donation}. Everything that we don’t spend on producing the show will be donated to the PSF to keep the community alive.
- Date of recording – August 08, 2015
- Hosts Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
- Today we are interviewing the core developers of Nikola and Pelican about static site generators
Interview- Introductions
- Monitorial.net <- Justin
- Upriise <- Justin
- Works for Canonical <- Roberto
- How did you get introduced to Python?
- Justin:
- Needed a way to get order data to payment processor for commerce company
- Roberto:
- 1996 got involved with Linux
- Found XForms
- Wrote Python bindings
- For our listeners who might not know, what are static site generators and what are some of the advantages they bring to the table over other similar systems that perform the same function?
- Roberto
- Remove all the effort from the computer that serves the website
- Server runs no code
- Smaller ssurface area for security purposes
- Justin
- Better performance – important for responsiveness and uptime
- Easier deployment and maintenance
- Easier versioning and migration
- Can version both input and output
- There are a number of static site generators available in virtually every language. Why would a user want to leverage a Python solution vs Ruby, javascript, Go, etc.?
- ReStructured TeXT is best supported in Python
- Good language for supporting various markup syntaxes
- Most static site generators seem to have a primary focus on blogging. What is it about these tools that lend themselves so well to that use case?
- The author of the tools shape the purpose of the tool
- Most popular among programmers which is a demographic that is likely to have a blog
- Workflow is similar to what programmers are used to
- Still useful for non-chronological pages due to templating system
- Something that struck me comparing the two systems is that they have largely the same kinds of data going into the metadata block for each post, but it’s expressed in a different / incompatible way in each. Have you ever considered agreeing on a standard and even advertising it as such so all static site generators could make use of it?
- Challenging because of the idiosyncratic way problems are solved in each system
- Wouldn’t end up with the same site even if metadata were identical
- Roberto & Justin are talking, this may happen!
- The themes in Pelican and Nikola have very different feels and one of the things that initially drew me to Pelican is the larger catalog of themes available. What are some of the challenges involved in creating a theme for a static site generator?
- Many programmers who write SSGs aren’t amazing at HTML
- Pelican and Nikola seem to be the most widely used projects for creating static sites using Python. What do you think is the key to that popularity?
- Frequent updates, good documentation and large community
- Easy to get up and running
- Need to be productive inside of 2 minutes
- Good first impressions are key
- Importance of extensibility
- Core modularity and availability of plugins
- A lot of people have written about the importance (and difficulty) of writing and maintaining good documentation in open source projects. Nikola’s documentation is excellent. How did Nikola manage this in its development process and what can other open source projects learn from this?
- No secrets – just do it and keep it updated.
- Need to look at the tool as if using it for the first time
- What are some specific examples of unique and interesting uses your site generators have been put to?
- Justin:
- kernel.org, Debian, Chicago Linux Users, TransFX (translation house) all use Pelican
- Embedding Jupyter notebooks and MathML rendering in posts
- Site search plugin
- Nikola:
- Big adoption in the sciences (Jupyter notebook embedding supported in core)
- Output is forever
- Plugin to trigger internet archive to reindex site
- Nikola’s flexible deployment architecture (e.g. the use of doit tasks) seems to lend itself to some interesting use cases. What was the inspiration for this?
- Build was taking 1 1/2 hours, doit allowed for incremental generation
- Doit is a generic task system. Nikola has no “main” it’s a collection of doit tasks.
- Is there any specific help that you would like to ask of the audience?
- Contribute themes
- Help with reviewing issues and pull requests
Picks- Tobias
- Termux
- Magic Wormhole
- Arrow
- Chris
- Emacs Lisp Introduction
- 3D Cellular Automata in Minecraft
- Prompt 2
- Justin
- Monitorial.net
- Upriise
- Ergodox
- Jarvis Bamboo Sit/Stand Desk
- Talky.io
- Fish shell
- Tacklebox
- iTerm v3.0 beta
- Brother Thelonious Belgian Ale
- Frog’s Leap Winery
- PyCon Italia and Italy in general
- Roberto
- Neal Stephenson
- Docopt
- Fried Pickles
- PyAr Python Argentina User Group
- PyCon Argentina in Mendosa
- PyCamp
Keep In Touch- Justin
- Personal
- Pelican
- Roberto
- Nikola
- Forums and mailing list
1 hr 33 min - Al Sweigart on Python for Non-ProgrammersWe got the opportunity to speak with Al Sweigart about his work on books like ‘Automate The Boring Stuff With Python’ and ‘Invent With Python’. We discussed how Python can be useful to people who don’t work as software engineers, why coding literacy is important for the general populace and how that will affect the ways in which we interact with software.53 min
About The Python Podcast.__init__
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The podcast about Python and the people who make it great
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