It's a new calendar year, which means it's time to think about what year-long plans I have for my contributions to the Python project. There's always the usual plans I have to approve

After writing my post on why Python 3 exists which included an explanation about the most common question/complaint about why Python 3 forced textual and binary data into separate types, I heard

The Kübler-Ross model outlines the stages that one goes through in dealing with death: Denial Anger Bargaining Depression Acceptance This is sometimes referred to as the five stages of grief.Some have jokingly

Python 2.6 has been around for over 7 years, first released in 2008 and last released in 2013 (as shown by the nice image provided by Fluent Python on Twitter and used

This month I held a Q&A at PuPPy (the Puget Sound Python users group) that eventually led to me explaining why Python 3 came into existence and the whole string/bytes

Talk to any developer that inherits some large, old code base that has developed semantics as time has gone on and they will always have something they wished they could change about the

I was employed at Google when Google+ launched. Like many Googlers, I tried it out, loved the sharing model, and stuck with the platform. People always joked that Google+ was made up of

Over the past month I have become aware of multiple people either stepping away from open source or trying to figure out how not to burn out from it [1, 2, 3,4]

If there is one persnickety thing people ask of python-dev it is for the GIL to go away. People view it as this great bugaboo of performance that hinders CPython in a world

I happen to be on the team at Microsoft which recently launched an in-preview Jupyter Notebook service in Azure ML Studio. Before this I had heard of Jupyter Notebooks (nee IPython Notebooks) but

At (and since) PyCon 2015, there has been interest in trying to get quantified numbers in relation to Python 3 adoption (see PyPI download numbers and uptake in the astronomy community). One number

Thomas Robitaille ran a survey on Python usage in the astronomy community and wrote up a great blog post on the results (a big thanks from me to Thomas for taking the time

While at PyCon this year, someone pointed out that the hope/goal/expectation when Python 3 was released was to have over 50% of new projects using Python 3 within five years, and

In this world of Android vs. iOS -- with a smattering of Windows Mobile and Blackberry -- I find native apps somewhat annoying. In the beginning, iOS was actually not going have any

With 2015 bringing a federal election where current polling suggests that either the Liberals or Conservatives could have a minority government based on how people vote, I'm rather interested in how election systems

Ever since WhatsApp announced their web app, I have seen various people complain about having to keep your phone on to send messages. But in all of these posts people seem to be

My mother-in-law has a cousin she likes to talk to. Because I like to simplify my tech support requirements by standardizing my entire family on a single platform when possible, all of my

Today I committed a heavily updated version of the Python 2/3 porting HOWTO. Basically the doc has shifted from suggesting you use 2to3 for gaining Python 3 compatibility for your Python 2

When Python 2.7.9rc1 was released, I shared the news through the +Python Google+ account. Comments on the post ranged from "thanks for keeping Python 2.7 alive!" to "

My good friend Paul is about to start playing Destiny with me on the ps4, so I figured I should explain to him the game mechanics upfront so he can make wise decisions

My take on Xmas is to not buy gifts for anyone. More often than not people get you something that you didn't really want, or if they did you then have to guess

There is a single show that my wife and I watch which we torrent. I had been downloading the torrent manually and then using Videostream to cast to my TV. But having to

When explaining the cloud to my relatives, I typically explain it as "people running computers on your behalf that you can reach over the internet". That's enough to get the point

A relative just visited whose current technology consists of a Windows computer and a flip-phone. It was one of those situations where someone was coming to me as a blank slate for a