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

One of the hardest parts of doing a new release of CPython is getting people to test it before the final release goes out. While CPython has a test suite and we try to do our best to have good code coverage (currently sitting

During his PyCon US 2015 keynote, Guido stated that we "[wanted] at least two femail core devs" by PyCon US 2016. Guido, Raymond Hettinger, and myself offered to help mentor women who wanted to be core devs to help make this happen.

The CLA bot for the PSF is designed defensively because if the bot accidentally lets a pull request through from someone that has not signed the CLA that could lead to legal troubles. To alleviate any worries I may have about bugs lurking in

It all started when ... While developing the CLA bot for Python I realized this might not be the last bot I or anyone else may have to write for helping with CPython's development once it shifts to GitHub. As such, I began to think

If you know me or have been reading this blog for a couple of years then chances are you know I'm a programming language nut. I not only believe that being a polyglot programmer makes you a better programmer overall, but I'm always on

[This approach as subsequently started to fail for me, so I have switched to the technique outlined for using Prism; it's a bit manual to have to list every language you want highlighted, but it works with the Casper 2.2.1 theme] When