I wonder how many people realize that Python has a lot of syntactic sugar? I'm not claiming it's like a Lisp-based language where the syntax is as bare bones as possible (although the Lisp comparison is not entirely unfounded), but much of Python's syntax

Why ask this question?It's no secret that I want a Python implementation for WebAssembly. It would not only get Python into the browser, but with the fact that both iOS and Android support running JavaScript as part of an app it would also

Back in 2017 I wrote a blog post on how I manage version numbers. In that post I mentioned how I tried to follow semantic versioning. Over the subsequent 3 years I have come to the conclusion I actually don't like SemVer for my

For the Python extension for VS Code, I wrote a simple script for generating our changelog (think Towncrier, but simpler, Markdown-specific, and tailored to our needs). As part of our release process we have a step where you are supposed to run python news

I am going to admit upfront that this is a thought piece, a brain dump, me thinking out loud. Do not assume there is a lesson here, nor some goal I have in mind. No, this blog post is providing me a place to

When people start learning Python, they often will come across a package they want to try and it will usually start with "just pip install it!" The problem with that advice is it's a very simplistic view of how to manage packages and can

Fellow core developer and Canadian, Mariatta, asked on Twitter about python -m pip and who told her about that idiom along with asking for a reference explaining it: I learned sometime ago that we should be doing `python -m pip install ...` instead of simply

Someone emailed the steering council recently to ask what it was like to be on it, presumably because nominations will be opening next month. Instead of sending a private response I figured I would write a blog post instead so others could know what

[Updated 2019-11-17] On September 10, 2019 while I was in London, UK at the Python core dev sprints, I got a message from a user named "spacedrop" on Keybase. The message said I was being given 356.2904939 XLM as a surprise gift of

A co-worker of mine attended a technical talk about how Go's module mirror works and he asked me whether there was something there that Python should do. Best technical talk that I've seen in a long time: @katie_hockman on Go Module

Over the past two months I have given two podcast interviews where I talk about how we handled Guido's retirement, chose our new governance model, and what being on the inaugural steering council has been like. Now that I have "talked it out" at

If you have  ever looked at a project that has a lot of wheels (like numpy), you may have wondered what the part that comes after the project name and version mean. Well, they are known as platform compatibility tags and they are primarily

This post is meant to act as a summary of the current state of Python's governance as of the end of 2018. If you want to see an alternative take on what I present here, LWN has an article. What did Guido provide us?

(If you would prefer to watch a 30 minute talk on this same content, you can watch my Python US 2018 keynote) Who am I? [1] To start, I want to provide my bonafides so you know I'm not some crank spouting some armchair

[Please note that the code in this blog post is now up on PyPI as part of the modutil library] One of the new features in Python 3.7 is PEP 562 which adds support for __getattr__() and __dir__() on modules. Both open up

There was a question at work about what the most popular Docker container image for running Python code was? I didn't have an answer, so I asked on Twitter to see if a clear answer could be gleaned. The first poll asked what people's

On Wednesday, October 25th, I gave a workshop at PyLadies Vancouver on how to package up your code and put it up on PyPI. Since this workshop came about by request, I figured others out there who couldn't attend might be interested in the

I recently helped someone release their first project on PyPI and I was asked why I did version numbers the way I did, so I figured I would share where my current thinking on the topic sits (this doesn't mean all of my projects

[This was meant to be a contribution to a book collecting chapters on various topics that would help "a programmer who has never been politically active, but is starting to wonder why so many things seem to be going from bad to worse&

To gain commit rights on CPython, a pre-existing core developer nominates your for commit rights to python-committers. That nominator lays out roughly why you should be given commit rights, and then promises to watch your commits for a little while to help you with

I was reading the latest issue of Pycoder's Weekly and they mentioned Thomas Kluyver's pull request to implement PEP 518 in pip. The newsletter linked to the reddit thread announcing the landing of the PR, and being a co-author of the PEP I was

While developing the CLA bot for CPython (aka, the Knights Who Say Ni), I decided to make it asynchronous, partially for performance reasons but also because I simply wanted to. 😁 The problem with doing that for a GitHub bot is there wasn't any pre-existing

When one thinks of ways of customizing classes at creation time, people probably typically think of metaclasses and class decorators. Metaclasses are at typically viewed as the beginning of class creation while class decorators are at the end. But what you may not know