Summary
In this episode Chris and I look back at the past 83 episodes of the show and talk about what we learned, what we’ve enjoyed, and some of the highlights.
Brief Introduction
- Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
- I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable.
- When you’re ready to launch your next project you’ll need somewhere to deploy it. Check out Linode at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your awesome app.
- You’ll want to make sure that your users don’t have to put up with bugs, so you should use Rollbar for tracking and aggregating your application errors to find and fix the bugs in your application before your users notice they exist. Use the link rollbar.com/podcastinit to get 90 days and 300,000 errors for free on their bootstrap plan.
- Visit our site to subscribe to our show, sign up for our newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch.
- To help other people find the show you can leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, and tell your friends and co-workers
- Join our community! Visit discourse.pythonpodcast.com for your opportunity to find out about upcoming guests, suggest questions, and propose show ideas.
- Your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
- Today we’re interviewing each other about the past year and a half of the show.
Interview with Tobias and Chris
- Introductions
- What have been some of the most unexpected or surprising aspects of the show for you during the past year and a half? – Tobias
- What are your top three favorite shows so far and why? – Chris
- If you could have a longer conversation with any of the past guests, who would you pick? – Tobias
- What has doing the show meant to you? – Chris
- What have you learned while doing the show that you wish you had known at the start? – Tobias
- How has the production process evolved since the beginning of the show? – Chris
Chris Leaving the Show – Chris
- Tobias and I started new jobs (At MIT Office of Digital Learning and Amazon Web Services, respectively)
- We’re much, much busier these days, making coordination difficult
- Tobias is ready to take the show solo and I (Chris) support him in this
- Chris still plans to support the show as an avid fan
Keep In Touch
Picks
- Tobias
- Chris
- StaSh – Shell for Pythonista
- Producing a Podcast
- The Python Community
The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra  / CC BY-SA
[00:00:14]
Unknown:
Hello, and welcome to podcast.init, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. When you're ready to launch your next project, you'll need somewhere to deploy it, you should check out Linode at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your awesome app. You'll want to make sure that your users don't have to put up with any bugs, so you should use Rollbar for tracking and aggregating your application errors to find and fix the bugs in your application before your users notice they exist. Use the link, rolebar.com/podcast in it to get 90 days and 300, 000 errors tracked for free on their bootstrap plan. You can also visit the site to subscribe to our show, sign up for our newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch at www.podcastandit.com.
To help other people find the show, you can leave a review on Itunes or Google Play Music and tell your friends and coworkers. You can also join the community at discourse.pythonpodcast.com to find out about upcoming guests, suggest questions, and propose show ideas. Your hosts, as usual, are Tobias Macy and Chris Patti. And today, we're interviewing each other about the past year and a half of the show. So, Chris, we've introduced ourselves a little bit before, but I guess, why don't you reintroduce yourself?
[00:01:21] Unknown:
Absolutely. I'm Chris Patti, and I'm currently a system development engineer with Amazon Web Services. I've, been doing this computering thing for a very long time. I've been in the business about 20 26 years now. Kinda crazy. Worn many hats, and, yeah, gonna be puttering with this stuff until I'm old and gray, I think.
[00:01:41] Unknown:
And, I guess I'll reintroduce myself as well. So, you know, I'm here every week, but, I've been working in engineering. Oh, I don't even remember how long it's been now. I think I've up to 7 or so years now. Sounds pitiful next to yours, but it still sounds crazy when I think back about it because it doesn't seem quite so long ago as that. No. No. In tech terms, 7 years is a long time. There's no question about it. If I think back in my own career, 7 years, that's, you know yeah. That's that's definitely it it's weird. Like,
[00:02:10] Unknown:
when you've been in the business for a long time, it it almost becomes incomprehensively long. It's like, you know, 25 years feels like several lifetimes ago. So 7 years is a good run, and no no sneezing at that.
[00:02:27] Unknown:
Yeah. And, in that time period, I've worn many different hats. So I started as a systems and network admin. I've worked as a software engineer. I've worked as a product manager. I've worked as a DevOps engineer. I've worked as a consultant and contractor. You know, I've been able to play with a lot of different technologies and stacks and business domains. And fortunately, Python has kept bringing me back, and I've been able to bring that into a lot of my roles. So I'm, happy to have been able to focus on such a well built and ubiquitous technology as Python throughout a large portion of my career.
[00:03:03] Unknown:
That is very cool. I obviously and I I kinda came to it much later. I've only been using Python for the last few years. In fact, I started doing this podcast not long after I started using Python in earnest professionally. So it's been sort of an interesting evolution, and I really love the languages. It has by far become my favorite programming language to work in bar none, and and I definitely don't see that changing anytime soon. I mean, I love programming languages. I I love sort of playing with them and learning them and, you know, poking around at them, but for sheer expressiveness and depth and breadth of, you know, libraries and support and just an amazing community, Python's hard to beat.
[00:03:45] Unknown:
So what have been some of the most unexpected or surprising aspects of doing the show during the past year and a half?
[00:03:53] Unknown:
I would say for me, it has been the depth and the breadth. Right? I mean, like, just, you know, thinking in terms of at the beginning when we said, okay. Well, you know, Python needs a podcast because as we discussed in our episode with Michael Kennedy a few weeks back, we both started out at a time when there wasn't any at all or at least not none that had been produced in any recent memory. I never would have thought that we would be talking to people who fought crime with Python or did neuropsychology experiments with Python or did astronomy with Python or, you know, it's just been such a wild ride in terms of the incredible variety of things that people are using this language for that it's been a real eye opener for me and has has definitely sort of deepened my appreciation for the language because, you know, there are plenty of other programming languages out there, but and I could be totally wrong, but I don't think any of them have such an incredibly wide variety of applications as Python does just by virtue of its success with, scientific and and embedded communities.
[00:04:59] Unknown:
I think that if any language were to lay claim to the level of variety, they would probably be c or c plus plus, maybe Lisp. Right. Right. But as far as the level of expressiveness and terceness that you can get out of a language and still have it be so widely used, I think Python definitely takes the cake in that realm.
[00:05:17] Unknown:
Yeah. I I totally agree. I mean, there are other languages, you know, that that offer similar kinds of functionality as Python, but none of them have enjoyed such wide adoption.
[00:05:27] Unknown:
Yeah. As far as the things that I found most surprising while producing the show, I think, are, 1, the fact that it's still going and that people are listening to it, and we seem to still have a general upward trend in terms of the number of listeners. And the other surprising thing is that so many people, when I reach out to them to ask if they wanna be on the show, say yes and, you know, express, gratitude for being invited. When we first started the show, I reached out to a couple of people who I had some big connection to, but I didn't really expect that they would actually say yes, given their stature in the community. So our first couple episodes were, you know, Thomas Hatch, the creator of SaltStack, who is obviously a very busy man, but he actually took the time out to speak with us. Reuben Lerner, who has a very successful training business that he's been able to build up around Python, Travis Oliphant, who has built up a successful consulting company, as well as having created some of the foundational libraries for this community. So just the stature of the people who we've been able to bring on the show, and also, as you've mentioned, the breadth and variety of people and episodes that we've been able to do from the creator of NumPy and SciPy to Tom Rothamal, the creator of the Renpy narrative fiction library, to speaking with Eric Holcher about documentation and Eric Schless about using data science and Python to fight human trafficking. So, yeah, it's just amazing the variety of people we've been able to speak to and the fact that so many of them have actually agreed to come on the show and grace us with their presence.
[00:06:58] Unknown:
It's impressive to me as well. It's kind of a testament to the Python community. Right? That we that people are so willing despite the fact that they're crazy, crazy busy to take the time out to speak with us and give back to the community in that way.
[00:07:12] Unknown:
And speaking of the number of different people we've had on and the subjects that we've covered, what are some of your top shows that you enjoy doing the most and why?
[00:07:22] Unknown:
I would say that my favorite shows are the, the PEP show, is is definitely 1 of my all time favorites just because of the fact, not only was some really great technical information surfaced and sort of like, you know, I've actually pointed to other people who don't use Python at all and may never to that episode to to basically say, like, I think this should be considered to be a a textbook case for here is how you evolve a language in the community around it with some direction and provide the structure to make that evolution happen in a really positive way. I think they've done an amazing job with that. And on top of it, it was just a fun conversation. I mean, we laughed a lot that evening, and we had a really great time doing it. So that's definitely in my top 3.
[00:08:13] Unknown:
We had also incorporated a lot of the early history of Python as well and pretty seamlessly incorporated that into the narrative, which is 1 of the other things that I appreciated about that episode. Because as people who come into the community later, there are so many different inside jokes and aspects of the way that the language in the community evolved that are created by the people who came to it the earliest and being able to get a bit of an understanding of how all that came to be is definitely appreciated.
[00:08:42] Unknown:
Definitely. I would say another of my favorites is the interview that we did with, Jonathan Slenders of the Python prompt toolkit and pt Python fame, just because I felt like that was a really interesting technical conversation, and I learned a lot about various aspects of, you know, not just sort of Python and cross platform aspects with asyncio. And it was just a really great sort of wide ranging conversation. And as a result of that conversation, you know, IPython folks later on, which was also a great episode. I think the the other 1 that I really enjoyed is, the episode that we did with the folks who build, and maintain Kivy just because I thought it was really cool to see people doing really sort of interesting things with Python that people would not normally think of using a language like Python 4 and doing them well and and really sort of talking about these crazy apps they're they're building with gigantic light tables and things like that and interactive multimedia, demonstrations. So that was definitely a great 1 as well.
[00:09:55] Unknown:
Yeah. I think some of the ones that stand out to me are the episode that we did with Holger Kreckl about pytest was really good in terms of digging into some of the technical detail and the history of the project and something that's so widely used across the community and how they managed to make it in such a way that it was easy to adopt even if you already had an existing test framework written in the unit test style. Right. Yeah. That was a good interesting was the episode with Tom Rothamal on Renpy because of the fact of how long he'd been running that project and the ways that he managed to evolve it in such a way that it stayed maintainable and stayed functional, and he was able to continue to add features to it without getting stuck with a, you know, big ball of mud that he didn't wanna touch because of the fear of, breaking something somewhere else in the app. So that was pretty interesting too.
[00:10:45] Unknown:
Oh, yeah. I remember that episode. That was a really good episode. And and I remember thinking it was really kind of funny when he told us the story of 1 user that he had who was still running an old PowerPC Mac. And as opposed to doing all this work to provide support, legacy support for PowerPC Macs going forward, he pulled an old Intel Mac out of the closet that he had and sent it to the user. So that way he could say, like, here. Now you can run Intel Mac software. I just thought that was a really great sort of, like, funny, you know, human story of someone overcoming technology challenges with human solutions.
[00:11:20] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm actually looking back through the list of episodes that we've done, and there's so many different interesting ones to pick out, like the highlighting developers talking about how they wrote a Lisp interpreter running on the Python AST, and how you can actually have bidirectional interfaces between Lisp and Python in the same via, you know, same runtime.
[00:11:39] Unknown:
That was really cool. Learning more about the AST and how Python parses syntax and how versatile it is, that was really cool.
[00:11:47] Unknown:
You know, on a community aspect, speaking with Manisha Sanneh about the software and data carpentry projects and introducing proper software engineering methodologies and data engineering methodologies to people working in academia so that they could improve the reproducibility of their work. The episode about Cython was really interesting because, again, of the technical depth and being able to dig into how the product got started and how it's able to optimize Python in a way that it can be compiled down to machine code. It's hard to pick out, you know, a list of top episodes because they've all been so interesting in their own right. It's true. You could really go on and on and on. Like, I was just thinking the episode with Glyph was really great. I mean, chatting with him about some of the things he'd been looking at recently with, you know, around ethics and things like that and sort of, like, how software is beginning to eat the world. Right. There are just so many. Yeah. Mypy with David Fisher and Greg Price was another fascinating episode talking about how to do incremental typing of Python code, beware with Russell Keith Magee and all the fascinating things that he's doing with Python to make it run natively on multiple platforms.
[00:12:50] Unknown:
Absolutely. In the SymPy episode, talking about how they're using Python to solve some really kinda hairy math problems and the difficulties involved in sort of, like, creating a framework for solving symbolic math. It's really cool stuff. Yeah. I'm gonna have to stop myself now before I just start listing off every single episode. But the thing that the the sort of the meta comment I will make is that what's neat is these are all really exceptional people, and we've had the opportunity to chat with them and sort of draw out you know, you can get a sense, right, that obviously people behind these projects are are are brilliant. You can't put a personality to it until you actually hear them speak about it. And that's been a really great opportunity.
[00:13:33] Unknown:
Yeah. Being able to dig into the history of these projects and the whys and wherefores and not just the how do you use it has definitely been pretty fascinating.
[00:13:42] Unknown:
Exactly. Exactly.
[00:13:44] Unknown:
If there were any of the guests who you could take aside and have a longer conversation with about anything, know, not even necessarily related to Python? Who are some of the people that you would pick as, you know, just a general conversational partner?
[00:13:59] Unknown:
I would say, for 1, I would be really curious to talk with what's the name of the gentleman who who runs Bware? Russell Keith Magee. Yes. Russell Keith Magee some more. Because that framework, I've honestly been playing with that framework off and on since we did that episode and really enjoying working with it. And I I've always found this idea of, you know, how hard cross platform UI is to be totally fascinating. So, definitely them. And, honestly, all 3 of the guys that we talked to as part of the Pep episode just because they were so it was so interesting, like you said, to hear, you know, these are people who've been with Python since pretty much the very beginning, and they really have a sense of how the language has evolved and some of that some of the, you know, the richness involved in making some of the decisions that were made, some of them that people kinda kvetch about or either love or hate, you know, every day. So those those folks, I would love to talk to more. And I and I really enjoyed also we didn't mention this in the favorite episodes, but I really enjoyed talking with, Griotch about, Avenia because I've always been kind of a fan of interactive games like that, and I think that using Python and Django to build 1 is such a super cool idea.
[00:15:12] Unknown:
I've actually been lucky enough to be able to follow-up with some of the people who we've interviewed in the past when I went to PyCon. So for instance, I had a really great time hanging out with Auggie Fackler during the conference. I get to spend a lot of time hanging out with Mike Kennedy of the Talk Python podcast. I spoke with Jacob Kobach a little bit, after 1 of the conference days. You know, I was able to spend some time speaking with Glyph. If I were to pick anybody who I could have a longer conversation with, I think it would probably be pretty fascinating to speak with K Lars Long and just have a broad free ranging conversation because he definitely seems like quite the character who has a lot of stories to tell across a long and interesting life. Absolutely. I thought a part of your discussion that you had with him around his
[00:15:50] Unknown:
Synesthesia. Synesthesia. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Him around his Synesthesia. Synesthesia. Thank you so much. The way he sees code as color was totally fascinating in how when code follows PEP 8, it no longer seems beautiful to him, and it's all the wrong color. And I'd be really curious to hear if relaxing the line length requirements would change that for him because so many people just sort of I don't wanna say disregard, but, again, relax, pep 8, 80 character limit, and go with a 130 characters. I'd be really curious to hear if that ameliorates the problem for him.
[00:16:24] Unknown:
Yeah. Some of the other people who I'd really love to speak with at greater length is Barry Warsaw from the PEP episode because he's been around since the beginning of Python essentially. You know, he was there in the very early days. So he's been involved in the community for a long time, and he's still working with Python. Travis Oliphant, I've had the great pleasure of being able to speak with on a number of occasions even before I started the podcast. And he's a very interesting and, accomplished individual. So he's got a lot of great insight into Python and general technology and where things are going, as well as just having a great scientific background and just being a wonderful person all around. Basically, I would love to be able to have longer conversations with just about everybody that we've already spoken with. And maybe over the coming years, I'll have that opportunity. Indeed. What has doing the show meant to you on a personal basis?
[00:17:12] Unknown:
I would say the biggest thing by far is it has given me the opportunity to meet and become acquainted with so many sort of big names in our community. It's been really, really nifty. Because in addition to doing the shows with them in a number of cases, I've also sort of interacted with them outside the bounds of the podcast going back and forth. So, you know, they're they're really neat folks. It's been great to sort of, have the opportunity to expand my network. I mean, I I've been very lucky. I've worked with a lot of amazing people through the years, but it's been really nifty to be a Python fan and read about these people and and then sort of have the opportunity to to get to know them a little bit. I think that's the biggest thing. And also just, you know, once again, being able to say, like, when, you know, relatives or whatever the case may be say, well, why do you do this? And it's like, well, because, you know, I've had the opportunity to talk to somebody who fights sex traffickers using this using this tool, you know. And that's something that people who aren't technical at all can understand. That's something they can really wrap their heads around and say, wow. That is pretty neat because it's such a profound effect that he's having on the world by using these tools that he's built. I like to point at that episode as an example of software has eaten the world. You know? Like, when you think of how meta and full circle that idea is that he builds software to search the dark web, which is then used
[00:18:35] Unknown:
to prosecute people committing these horrible acts is just incredible to me. Yeah. Being able to help them share that with a broader audience is definitely very gratifying because I know that, you know, there are some open source projects that have a hard time gaining traction or gaining followers because it's difficult to get visibility with the massive sea of options that are out there. So being able to help bring some of these people to the forefront or, you know, people who are well known, being able to give them an avenue of expressing more of their personal side of the story than is easy to do in a technical context is very rewarding. And, also, as you said, being able to form more of a personal relationship with a lot of these people in the community and carry on additional conversation outside of the bounds of the podcast and just make more friends as a result. I think the most powerful example of that was when I was able to go to PyCon this year and take part in so many great conversations with people both who have been on the show and who listened to the show and just hearing their feedback.
And there there was 1 gentleman who I spoke with who, as a result of listening to the some of the episodes that were focusing more on data science, ended up making a career shift because it was so interesting to him that he decided to put in the extra effort to study up on it and change the direction that he was taking with his work. So it's pretty remarkable how something that started off as such a small idea has grown into being something so much larger than myself.
[00:19:54] Unknown:
It really is kind of amazing when you think that you and I were sitting in that office of that startup that we both worked for a few years ago saying, you know, there really needs to be a Python podcast.
[00:20:04] Unknown:
And then it's evolved into this. Yeah. Every now and then, I'll stop and look at some of the download metrics, you know, and realize, wow, somebody, somebody across the world in Mongolia just listened to what I was saying 5 hours ago or 2 weeks ago or whatever it was. Or, you know, somebody in Central Africa just downloaded this episode to learn more about the story about this Python project. So it's pretty remarkable what a wide reach this has had just beyond what I would ever have expected when we first started.
[00:20:31] Unknown:
It's true. It really is definitely true. It's it's been kind of amazing even aside from the metrics just to see, you know, people people who who contact me or or wanna meet me or whatever the case may be because of the podcast. It really has been a great experience. I do not regret a single minute of it. And what are some of the things that you've learned in the process of doing the show that you wish you had known at the start? Well, boy. I I would think that you would be able to to correlate this 1, Tobias, but I would say an emphasis on audio quality. Yes. Absolutely.
[00:21:03] Unknown:
Be being able to improve the, recording method and, you know, my microphone technique as well as realizing during the first few episodes even after I bought an external mic that wasn't actually what was being picked up on the audio. So having a better understanding of how to properly configure my microphone on Linux would have been a nice thing to know at the start. Yeah. It's it's definitely true that, I mean, you know, it it's 1 of those things that, like, if you're gonna do a podcast,
[00:21:27] Unknown:
invest in a mic. They're not that expensive. I mean, I think my, you know, blue snowball was, like, $50 or something like that. It's not a huge amount of money, and it helps a lot. It really does. And just sort of think through how that's gonna work and make test recordings and play them and play them for other people. And, really, you're just gonna save yourself an awful lot of pain. I still think about early on that gentleman who was an audio production engineer who was just so unhappy because the audio was so terrible. And I can't blame him. You know? It's it's it's 1 of those things where I kinda totally get it right because it's like us as software engineers when we go and look, you know, watch a movie, and they're putting up, like, fake code on the screen. We're just like, oh god. This is just so painful. I'm sure it must be very similar. You must be just like, new people. What are you doing? So, yeah, that's that's been a big 1. The audio quality is a big 1. And I would say another big 1 is just sort of be aware of what kind of time commitment it is when you first start out. Because, you know, you think, oh, I'll just do this podcast. It's not be any big deal. And then you learn about editing, and you learn about the amount of time that it takes to coordinate with guests and get guests and scheduling.
[00:22:39] Unknown:
And it is a lot of work. It's totally worth it, but it's it it is an awful lot of work. It's a big commitment. No question about it. Yeah. And I'll definitely second the audio quality. I've been focusing a lot more lately both on better microphone technique as well as researching more about how to improve the editing process. Yeah. Another thing that I kinda wish I knew at the beginning was how to more effectively market the podcast. And, you know, now that I've actually moved the feed to a new site where I have more control over the download statistics and all that kind of stuff. I wish I had had had a little bit more foresight in terms of having better control of that information from the beginning because now I'm trying to figure out a way to get a data dump from my previous podcast host as to how I can get all the raw metrics so that I can import it into my new tools. But, you know, it's just 1 of those things where you live and learn. And if I can't get it, so be it. But it would certainly be nice to have. So having more control over every aspect of the podcast is useful, but it can also mean extra work. So it's it's 1 of those trade offs. Another thing that would have been nice to know when we first started is how to have a more conversational interview style, because the first few episodes were very stiff, and we would come up with a long list of questions and just read them off verbatim and not really have a very good flow. You know, I think we still got some decent information out of it, but being able to just use the questions as more of a general guide and be more ad hoc in terms of the conversational style has been great. Yeah, the first few episodes, like, I listened to our introduction episode recently or started to listen to it, and it was just so incredibly painful. So painful. It's like we were so wooden. So, Tobias, what do you think? It's like it's really, really bad. I just wanna say, as far as a more conversational interview style, I was actually just yesterday listening to your interview with Klaw Islam, and it struck me
[00:24:29] Unknown:
how much your interview style in particular has evolved. You really did a great job sort of keeping the questions rolling and keeping it very organic and keeping it flowing. So you really you've come a long way. I think it's fantastic. I appreciate that. Yeah. We we both learned a lot, to be sure. As I read it very woodenly, how has the production process evolved since the beginning of the show? Okay.
[00:24:55] Unknown:
It is very different from when we started to now. So when we first started, we recorded directly just using Skype. I think we used Audacity to start, but I don't remember exactly. But I was handling all of the editing, all the recording, all the scheduling. And fairly early on, I think it was probably something in the range of episodes, you know, between 10 15 or so that my wife actually took over doing all the editing. So every episode, every week that has been put out since that time, so upwards of a year and a half by now, has actually been edited and produced by my wife. And so she's definitely been gaining a lot of experience with that.
She's been working hard to make sure that the episodes come out on time and with good quality even when I do a bad job of my microphone technique or do bad job of making sure that all the episode files are where they're supposed to be, she's been keeping me in line. That's great. Yeah. We've also evolved the scheduling aspects of it where to begin with, I would just send emails back and forth between all the guests and you and I till we finally agreed on a date. And after a little while of that, we found a tool called byte dot in, which we've mentioned on the show before that we use for handling all the scheduling to make it a little bit more hands off where you just create an invitation, and then people can vote on times when they're available until there's, you know, 1 agreed upon time. So that's made things pretty painless on that front. Organizing everything into a Trello board was something that we did fairly flow of where different episodes are in the pipeline as well as, flow of where different episodes are in the pipeline as well as a bit of a CRM as far as who's been contacted and when and what the status is of the, you know, scheduling or where where the communication is at. So I've been handing over more of that to my wife as far as the research for contact information and the scheduling aspects. The other thing that's different is for quite a while, up until just recently, we've been using a static site for the website.
You know, we've been using Pelican for generating the website and hosting all the media on Podbean, which is a paid hosting provider. And just recently I actually just this weekend flipped the feed over to the new website. I'm using a WordPress site with the Podlove plugin, and that's actually been pretty great. It's a really well built plugin for being able to manage the episodes and provide a lot of extra metadata and information so that it displays better in things like iTunes. Few episodes ago, we interviewed Kyle Martin about the Podbuzz tool for being able to sort of prompt people to provide reviews on iTunes and be able to aggregate other reviews across the different geographical regions that Itunes is available in. So that's been useful. So just generally being a bit more professional as far as the overall production process and quality of the show and trying to market it a little bit more effectively, which is another place that having the WordPress site comes in handy because it makes it easier to tie in different bits of automation. So as we progress, I'm hoping to add in even more polish and automation to the overall process. Right now, I'm still sort of holding things together with bailing wire and twine, but I wanna get it to the point where it's, you know, upload the episode, copy over the show notes, and press a button, and everything's all set. And, we're making good progress on that front.
[00:28:10] Unknown:
That's awesome. Yeah. It's it's kinda funny. So many people in our industry like to really just rank on WordPress. Oh, it's in secure. It's this, it's that. But the bottom line is, you know, I ran my blog on it for years, and it it just it drives like a Cadillac. You really just cannot beat its user experience. And it's versatility, you know, as as far as, like you said, all of the amazing plug ins and extensions that have been written for it for all kinds of applications and and the the amount that you get sort of for free out of box. Right? Like, you know, it helps you do SEO for your site. And it's just I mean, it's a really impressive platform, and I really wish people who give it a hard time would give it more credit for what it is. I mean, you wanna take potshots at it with regards to security. I'm not a security expert, so I can't say. But at least recognize that it does certain things very, very well. It is the success that it is for a reason.
[00:29:04] Unknown:
Yeah. I I was pretty snobbish about it for a while and didn't wanna use WordPress because it wasn't Python, and I wanted to write my own thing. I even looked around at different CMS tools for Python to try and build something out, and I had a couple of false starts building something with Wagtail that, you know, if I had the time and energy to do it, I I'm sure I could build something fabulous with Wagtail because it's a great project. But I just don't have the time to dedicate to that because the podcast well, I you know, much as I love it and much as I love building it, it is not my full time job. So Right. Right. I don't I don't have the luxury of being able to just spend all my time building out and, you know, hand tuning a custom application. And so being able to just stand up a WordPress site, add a few plugins, and configure them, and have something that does everything I needed to do is pretty fabulous.
[00:29:50] Unknown:
Absolutely. And I think there's a lot of wisdom, honestly, in not reinventing the wheel. Right? Like, I mean, just because we love Python and we love building things in Python, doesn't mean that for every use case that we may have, that we should use Python even if it kills us. Right? Yep. It's the zen of Python. Pragmatism beats purity. Precisely. Exactly. And this is a great example of that. So the next thing that we wanted to talk about is the fact that, I'll be leaving the show after this episode. It's been an incredible 1 that we've had. Like, how many episodes did we produce together? It had to be I'm trying to see I'm trying now I'm going for the list. It had to be We just put out episode 81, and you've been on the vast majority of them. So Yeah. Yeah. You've probably put out something in the range of about 60 episodes with me. Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say, absolutely. So that's that's pretty a pretty incredible achievement for a podcast given that most of them, you know, pod fade after a year or something like that. And we've been, keeping it going for for a while longer than that. And you're gonna keep cranking with it. So that's fantastic. I I feel like we've done a lot of really good work together. And the truth is that I, you know, started a few months ago with Amazon Web Services. And, you know, despite the the bad press that it's gotten, the New York Times article, whatever, it is not a death march by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a very intense place to work. You are working with people who are at the top of their game. The standards are very high. And I am I will freely admit that I am giving it my all and and growing and learning a tremendous amount just by being there and by striving to attain the standards that are that are in place there. And I totally love doing the podcast, but it's also kind of a relief to me to not have to simply in terms of time, not have to do it anymore. So I think this is a perfect opportunity for me to move on and for Tobias to take the reins, and I think he is doing a great job with the last few episodes. As I mentioned, I think the KLR's lawn episode is fantastic. I I know he's a lot busier these days, which makes it even tougher to do a 2 person podcast because you got a coordination to coordinating with guests. You have to coordinate with each other and, like, you know, for me, I'm on call sometimes and, you know, sometimes I just because of meetings or whatever, I just can't do it. So I think I think this makes all the sense in the world. And, you know, I I still love the show. I plan to support the show going forward and do whatever I can because it's a really I'm still invested in podcast. I'm in it, basically, at least emotionally. And, also, you know, I feel like, who knows? There may be a future in which I do a show of my own. I I kind of have the idea rolling this idea rolling around. I know a lot of people say that, going deep technically in podcast format won't work, and maybe it won't. But, it's not gonna happen immediately because as I said, I'm I really need to devote all my energies to sort of coming up to speed as an Amazonian as they like to as we like to call ourselves. But, hopefully, there will come a time when I have the resources to try this on my own. And when that happens, I think a show of, you know, strictly technical deep dives can be really cool experiment to try. Maybe it'll work. Maybe, you know, like, people say it's gonna be horribly boring, and people will tell me to stop torturing them. Who knows? It'll be worth it'll be an interesting experiment.
[00:33:02] Unknown:
Yeah. It's been great having you on the show. It was definitely nice having somebody to, work with as we got the show off the ground and, you know, built it up to what it is today. So I definitely appreciate the time and effort that you put into it, you know. And I definitely look forward to producing more episodes and generating more great content with all of our wonderful guests so that you continue to have something to listen to. This podcast is definitely at the top of my queue.
[00:33:28] Unknown:
You you make my workouts an awful lot more interesting.
[00:33:32] Unknown:
So for people who want to follow what you're up to and,
[00:33:35] Unknown:
reach out and contact you if they wish, what are the best ways for them to do that? Well, all my contact information, I use the about dot me service. So it's about dot me slash feoh. That's f as in Fred, echo Oscar hotel. And all my information there, my Twitter, my, you know, my blog, my email address, You name it. It's all there. I would love to hear from you if you especially if you, if you wanna talk about the podcast or, you know, or you wanna reach me or or you like the idea of a technical deep dive, podcast, definitely let me know. I would love to hear about it. And, yeah, that's that's the easiest way to get to get in touch with me and to to keep rest of what I'm doing. Alright. Well,
[00:34:17] Unknown:
with that, I will move to the picks. I'm gonna just gonna pick 1 today. It's a project called Locust, and it's a load testing tool written in Python for being able to write scripts to define the artificial user interactions for an HTTP service. It also supports other protocols if you wanna write adapters for it. So for instance, if you wanted to do, you know, JSON RPC or SOAP, you could do that as well. But it's primarily intended for HTTP clients. And I've actually been using it for load testing an app that we've been building at work where I am at the office of digital learning at MIT. And it's been really useful for being able to determine what kind of load the service can handle given a particular set of resources for the web host and seeing where things fall apart. So we've been using that to button up some of the low hanging fruit to get it ready for production. It's been a great experience to use it. So I definitely recommend people check it out if they need to, you know, hammer an HTTP host and see where it falls down. And with that, I'll pass it to you, Chris. Very cool. So my first pick is something called stash, a shell for Pythonista.
[00:35:22] Unknown:
We when we spoke to we never managed to get them on the show, but I I I've definitely picked Pythonista here in the past. It is a really great Python environment slash IDE for your iOS device. I think it works great in iPad. It also works on an iPhone. But to me, playing you know, writing code in an iPad is just a really great especially with a keyboard, is a really great experience. And Stash sort of, takes Pythonista, which by default is kind of a sealed environment and, enables you to install things via PIP into your into your iOS device. And it also even provides a Git client so you can pull things down from GitHub. It is a really neat project, so that's my that's my first pick. My next pick is producing a podcast. It is definitely 1 of those things that, you know, where it will take time, but you will get out of it definitely much more than you put into it. It's it's totally worth it. I recommend that anybody who feels like they have something to say and feels like there's a niche that needs filling, go give it a try and do it. And my last pick is the Python community because it has been really incredible opportunity interacting with such a great group of people. I really hope to get to PyCon 1 of these years. I'm even hoping this year. We'll see if it happens. But, but, even just being involved with with, the Python Boston meetup has been a really great experience.
It's been great. It's been great for me personally. It's been great for my career. So thank you to this awesome community. Well, thank you again for joining us this 1 last time, Chris, and,
[00:36:51] Unknown:
look forward to speaking with you outside of the podcast and bumping into you around Boston. So, thanks, and, thanks for all your help up to date. Absolutely. It's been a pleasure. I I will indeed see you around.
Hello, and welcome to podcast.init, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. When you're ready to launch your next project, you'll need somewhere to deploy it, you should check out Linode at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your awesome app. You'll want to make sure that your users don't have to put up with any bugs, so you should use Rollbar for tracking and aggregating your application errors to find and fix the bugs in your application before your users notice they exist. Use the link, rolebar.com/podcast in it to get 90 days and 300, 000 errors tracked for free on their bootstrap plan. You can also visit the site to subscribe to our show, sign up for our newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch at www.podcastandit.com.
To help other people find the show, you can leave a review on Itunes or Google Play Music and tell your friends and coworkers. You can also join the community at discourse.pythonpodcast.com to find out about upcoming guests, suggest questions, and propose show ideas. Your hosts, as usual, are Tobias Macy and Chris Patti. And today, we're interviewing each other about the past year and a half of the show. So, Chris, we've introduced ourselves a little bit before, but I guess, why don't you reintroduce yourself?
[00:01:21] Unknown:
Absolutely. I'm Chris Patti, and I'm currently a system development engineer with Amazon Web Services. I've, been doing this computering thing for a very long time. I've been in the business about 20 26 years now. Kinda crazy. Worn many hats, and, yeah, gonna be puttering with this stuff until I'm old and gray, I think.
[00:01:41] Unknown:
And, I guess I'll reintroduce myself as well. So, you know, I'm here every week, but, I've been working in engineering. Oh, I don't even remember how long it's been now. I think I've up to 7 or so years now. Sounds pitiful next to yours, but it still sounds crazy when I think back about it because it doesn't seem quite so long ago as that. No. No. In tech terms, 7 years is a long time. There's no question about it. If I think back in my own career, 7 years, that's, you know yeah. That's that's definitely it it's weird. Like,
[00:02:10] Unknown:
when you've been in the business for a long time, it it almost becomes incomprehensively long. It's like, you know, 25 years feels like several lifetimes ago. So 7 years is a good run, and no no sneezing at that.
[00:02:27] Unknown:
Yeah. And, in that time period, I've worn many different hats. So I started as a systems and network admin. I've worked as a software engineer. I've worked as a product manager. I've worked as a DevOps engineer. I've worked as a consultant and contractor. You know, I've been able to play with a lot of different technologies and stacks and business domains. And fortunately, Python has kept bringing me back, and I've been able to bring that into a lot of my roles. So I'm, happy to have been able to focus on such a well built and ubiquitous technology as Python throughout a large portion of my career.
[00:03:03] Unknown:
That is very cool. I obviously and I I kinda came to it much later. I've only been using Python for the last few years. In fact, I started doing this podcast not long after I started using Python in earnest professionally. So it's been sort of an interesting evolution, and I really love the languages. It has by far become my favorite programming language to work in bar none, and and I definitely don't see that changing anytime soon. I mean, I love programming languages. I I love sort of playing with them and learning them and, you know, poking around at them, but for sheer expressiveness and depth and breadth of, you know, libraries and support and just an amazing community, Python's hard to beat.
[00:03:45] Unknown:
So what have been some of the most unexpected or surprising aspects of doing the show during the past year and a half?
[00:03:53] Unknown:
I would say for me, it has been the depth and the breadth. Right? I mean, like, just, you know, thinking in terms of at the beginning when we said, okay. Well, you know, Python needs a podcast because as we discussed in our episode with Michael Kennedy a few weeks back, we both started out at a time when there wasn't any at all or at least not none that had been produced in any recent memory. I never would have thought that we would be talking to people who fought crime with Python or did neuropsychology experiments with Python or did astronomy with Python or, you know, it's just been such a wild ride in terms of the incredible variety of things that people are using this language for that it's been a real eye opener for me and has has definitely sort of deepened my appreciation for the language because, you know, there are plenty of other programming languages out there, but and I could be totally wrong, but I don't think any of them have such an incredibly wide variety of applications as Python does just by virtue of its success with, scientific and and embedded communities.
[00:04:59] Unknown:
I think that if any language were to lay claim to the level of variety, they would probably be c or c plus plus, maybe Lisp. Right. Right. But as far as the level of expressiveness and terceness that you can get out of a language and still have it be so widely used, I think Python definitely takes the cake in that realm.
[00:05:17] Unknown:
Yeah. I I totally agree. I mean, there are other languages, you know, that that offer similar kinds of functionality as Python, but none of them have enjoyed such wide adoption.
[00:05:27] Unknown:
Yeah. As far as the things that I found most surprising while producing the show, I think, are, 1, the fact that it's still going and that people are listening to it, and we seem to still have a general upward trend in terms of the number of listeners. And the other surprising thing is that so many people, when I reach out to them to ask if they wanna be on the show, say yes and, you know, express, gratitude for being invited. When we first started the show, I reached out to a couple of people who I had some big connection to, but I didn't really expect that they would actually say yes, given their stature in the community. So our first couple episodes were, you know, Thomas Hatch, the creator of SaltStack, who is obviously a very busy man, but he actually took the time out to speak with us. Reuben Lerner, who has a very successful training business that he's been able to build up around Python, Travis Oliphant, who has built up a successful consulting company, as well as having created some of the foundational libraries for this community. So just the stature of the people who we've been able to bring on the show, and also, as you've mentioned, the breadth and variety of people and episodes that we've been able to do from the creator of NumPy and SciPy to Tom Rothamal, the creator of the Renpy narrative fiction library, to speaking with Eric Holcher about documentation and Eric Schless about using data science and Python to fight human trafficking. So, yeah, it's just amazing the variety of people we've been able to speak to and the fact that so many of them have actually agreed to come on the show and grace us with their presence.
[00:06:58] Unknown:
It's impressive to me as well. It's kind of a testament to the Python community. Right? That we that people are so willing despite the fact that they're crazy, crazy busy to take the time out to speak with us and give back to the community in that way.
[00:07:12] Unknown:
And speaking of the number of different people we've had on and the subjects that we've covered, what are some of your top shows that you enjoy doing the most and why?
[00:07:22] Unknown:
I would say that my favorite shows are the, the PEP show, is is definitely 1 of my all time favorites just because of the fact, not only was some really great technical information surfaced and sort of like, you know, I've actually pointed to other people who don't use Python at all and may never to that episode to to basically say, like, I think this should be considered to be a a textbook case for here is how you evolve a language in the community around it with some direction and provide the structure to make that evolution happen in a really positive way. I think they've done an amazing job with that. And on top of it, it was just a fun conversation. I mean, we laughed a lot that evening, and we had a really great time doing it. So that's definitely in my top 3.
[00:08:13] Unknown:
We had also incorporated a lot of the early history of Python as well and pretty seamlessly incorporated that into the narrative, which is 1 of the other things that I appreciated about that episode. Because as people who come into the community later, there are so many different inside jokes and aspects of the way that the language in the community evolved that are created by the people who came to it the earliest and being able to get a bit of an understanding of how all that came to be is definitely appreciated.
[00:08:42] Unknown:
Definitely. I would say another of my favorites is the interview that we did with, Jonathan Slenders of the Python prompt toolkit and pt Python fame, just because I felt like that was a really interesting technical conversation, and I learned a lot about various aspects of, you know, not just sort of Python and cross platform aspects with asyncio. And it was just a really great sort of wide ranging conversation. And as a result of that conversation, you know, IPython folks later on, which was also a great episode. I think the the other 1 that I really enjoyed is, the episode that we did with the folks who build, and maintain Kivy just because I thought it was really cool to see people doing really sort of interesting things with Python that people would not normally think of using a language like Python 4 and doing them well and and really sort of talking about these crazy apps they're they're building with gigantic light tables and things like that and interactive multimedia, demonstrations. So that was definitely a great 1 as well.
[00:09:55] Unknown:
Yeah. I think some of the ones that stand out to me are the episode that we did with Holger Kreckl about pytest was really good in terms of digging into some of the technical detail and the history of the project and something that's so widely used across the community and how they managed to make it in such a way that it was easy to adopt even if you already had an existing test framework written in the unit test style. Right. Yeah. That was a good interesting was the episode with Tom Rothamal on Renpy because of the fact of how long he'd been running that project and the ways that he managed to evolve it in such a way that it stayed maintainable and stayed functional, and he was able to continue to add features to it without getting stuck with a, you know, big ball of mud that he didn't wanna touch because of the fear of, breaking something somewhere else in the app. So that was pretty interesting too.
[00:10:45] Unknown:
Oh, yeah. I remember that episode. That was a really good episode. And and I remember thinking it was really kind of funny when he told us the story of 1 user that he had who was still running an old PowerPC Mac. And as opposed to doing all this work to provide support, legacy support for PowerPC Macs going forward, he pulled an old Intel Mac out of the closet that he had and sent it to the user. So that way he could say, like, here. Now you can run Intel Mac software. I just thought that was a really great sort of, like, funny, you know, human story of someone overcoming technology challenges with human solutions.
[00:11:20] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm actually looking back through the list of episodes that we've done, and there's so many different interesting ones to pick out, like the highlighting developers talking about how they wrote a Lisp interpreter running on the Python AST, and how you can actually have bidirectional interfaces between Lisp and Python in the same via, you know, same runtime.
[00:11:39] Unknown:
That was really cool. Learning more about the AST and how Python parses syntax and how versatile it is, that was really cool.
[00:11:47] Unknown:
You know, on a community aspect, speaking with Manisha Sanneh about the software and data carpentry projects and introducing proper software engineering methodologies and data engineering methodologies to people working in academia so that they could improve the reproducibility of their work. The episode about Cython was really interesting because, again, of the technical depth and being able to dig into how the product got started and how it's able to optimize Python in a way that it can be compiled down to machine code. It's hard to pick out, you know, a list of top episodes because they've all been so interesting in their own right. It's true. You could really go on and on and on. Like, I was just thinking the episode with Glyph was really great. I mean, chatting with him about some of the things he'd been looking at recently with, you know, around ethics and things like that and sort of, like, how software is beginning to eat the world. Right. There are just so many. Yeah. Mypy with David Fisher and Greg Price was another fascinating episode talking about how to do incremental typing of Python code, beware with Russell Keith Magee and all the fascinating things that he's doing with Python to make it run natively on multiple platforms.
[00:12:50] Unknown:
Absolutely. In the SymPy episode, talking about how they're using Python to solve some really kinda hairy math problems and the difficulties involved in sort of, like, creating a framework for solving symbolic math. It's really cool stuff. Yeah. I'm gonna have to stop myself now before I just start listing off every single episode. But the thing that the the sort of the meta comment I will make is that what's neat is these are all really exceptional people, and we've had the opportunity to chat with them and sort of draw out you know, you can get a sense, right, that obviously people behind these projects are are are brilliant. You can't put a personality to it until you actually hear them speak about it. And that's been a really great opportunity.
[00:13:33] Unknown:
Yeah. Being able to dig into the history of these projects and the whys and wherefores and not just the how do you use it has definitely been pretty fascinating.
[00:13:42] Unknown:
Exactly. Exactly.
[00:13:44] Unknown:
If there were any of the guests who you could take aside and have a longer conversation with about anything, know, not even necessarily related to Python? Who are some of the people that you would pick as, you know, just a general conversational partner?
[00:13:59] Unknown:
I would say, for 1, I would be really curious to talk with what's the name of the gentleman who who runs Bware? Russell Keith Magee. Yes. Russell Keith Magee some more. Because that framework, I've honestly been playing with that framework off and on since we did that episode and really enjoying working with it. And I I've always found this idea of, you know, how hard cross platform UI is to be totally fascinating. So, definitely them. And, honestly, all 3 of the guys that we talked to as part of the Pep episode just because they were so it was so interesting, like you said, to hear, you know, these are people who've been with Python since pretty much the very beginning, and they really have a sense of how the language has evolved and some of that some of the, you know, the richness involved in making some of the decisions that were made, some of them that people kinda kvetch about or either love or hate, you know, every day. So those those folks, I would love to talk to more. And I and I really enjoyed also we didn't mention this in the favorite episodes, but I really enjoyed talking with, Griotch about, Avenia because I've always been kind of a fan of interactive games like that, and I think that using Python and Django to build 1 is such a super cool idea.
[00:15:12] Unknown:
I've actually been lucky enough to be able to follow-up with some of the people who we've interviewed in the past when I went to PyCon. So for instance, I had a really great time hanging out with Auggie Fackler during the conference. I get to spend a lot of time hanging out with Mike Kennedy of the Talk Python podcast. I spoke with Jacob Kobach a little bit, after 1 of the conference days. You know, I was able to spend some time speaking with Glyph. If I were to pick anybody who I could have a longer conversation with, I think it would probably be pretty fascinating to speak with K Lars Long and just have a broad free ranging conversation because he definitely seems like quite the character who has a lot of stories to tell across a long and interesting life. Absolutely. I thought a part of your discussion that you had with him around his
[00:15:50] Unknown:
Synesthesia. Synesthesia. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Him around his Synesthesia. Synesthesia. Thank you so much. The way he sees code as color was totally fascinating in how when code follows PEP 8, it no longer seems beautiful to him, and it's all the wrong color. And I'd be really curious to hear if relaxing the line length requirements would change that for him because so many people just sort of I don't wanna say disregard, but, again, relax, pep 8, 80 character limit, and go with a 130 characters. I'd be really curious to hear if that ameliorates the problem for him.
[00:16:24] Unknown:
Yeah. Some of the other people who I'd really love to speak with at greater length is Barry Warsaw from the PEP episode because he's been around since the beginning of Python essentially. You know, he was there in the very early days. So he's been involved in the community for a long time, and he's still working with Python. Travis Oliphant, I've had the great pleasure of being able to speak with on a number of occasions even before I started the podcast. And he's a very interesting and, accomplished individual. So he's got a lot of great insight into Python and general technology and where things are going, as well as just having a great scientific background and just being a wonderful person all around. Basically, I would love to be able to have longer conversations with just about everybody that we've already spoken with. And maybe over the coming years, I'll have that opportunity. Indeed. What has doing the show meant to you on a personal basis?
[00:17:12] Unknown:
I would say the biggest thing by far is it has given me the opportunity to meet and become acquainted with so many sort of big names in our community. It's been really, really nifty. Because in addition to doing the shows with them in a number of cases, I've also sort of interacted with them outside the bounds of the podcast going back and forth. So, you know, they're they're really neat folks. It's been great to sort of, have the opportunity to expand my network. I mean, I I've been very lucky. I've worked with a lot of amazing people through the years, but it's been really nifty to be a Python fan and read about these people and and then sort of have the opportunity to to get to know them a little bit. I think that's the biggest thing. And also just, you know, once again, being able to say, like, when, you know, relatives or whatever the case may be say, well, why do you do this? And it's like, well, because, you know, I've had the opportunity to talk to somebody who fights sex traffickers using this using this tool, you know. And that's something that people who aren't technical at all can understand. That's something they can really wrap their heads around and say, wow. That is pretty neat because it's such a profound effect that he's having on the world by using these tools that he's built. I like to point at that episode as an example of software has eaten the world. You know? Like, when you think of how meta and full circle that idea is that he builds software to search the dark web, which is then used
[00:18:35] Unknown:
to prosecute people committing these horrible acts is just incredible to me. Yeah. Being able to help them share that with a broader audience is definitely very gratifying because I know that, you know, there are some open source projects that have a hard time gaining traction or gaining followers because it's difficult to get visibility with the massive sea of options that are out there. So being able to help bring some of these people to the forefront or, you know, people who are well known, being able to give them an avenue of expressing more of their personal side of the story than is easy to do in a technical context is very rewarding. And, also, as you said, being able to form more of a personal relationship with a lot of these people in the community and carry on additional conversation outside of the bounds of the podcast and just make more friends as a result. I think the most powerful example of that was when I was able to go to PyCon this year and take part in so many great conversations with people both who have been on the show and who listened to the show and just hearing their feedback.
And there there was 1 gentleman who I spoke with who, as a result of listening to the some of the episodes that were focusing more on data science, ended up making a career shift because it was so interesting to him that he decided to put in the extra effort to study up on it and change the direction that he was taking with his work. So it's pretty remarkable how something that started off as such a small idea has grown into being something so much larger than myself.
[00:19:54] Unknown:
It really is kind of amazing when you think that you and I were sitting in that office of that startup that we both worked for a few years ago saying, you know, there really needs to be a Python podcast.
[00:20:04] Unknown:
And then it's evolved into this. Yeah. Every now and then, I'll stop and look at some of the download metrics, you know, and realize, wow, somebody, somebody across the world in Mongolia just listened to what I was saying 5 hours ago or 2 weeks ago or whatever it was. Or, you know, somebody in Central Africa just downloaded this episode to learn more about the story about this Python project. So it's pretty remarkable what a wide reach this has had just beyond what I would ever have expected when we first started.
[00:20:31] Unknown:
It's true. It really is definitely true. It's it's been kind of amazing even aside from the metrics just to see, you know, people people who who contact me or or wanna meet me or whatever the case may be because of the podcast. It really has been a great experience. I do not regret a single minute of it. And what are some of the things that you've learned in the process of doing the show that you wish you had known at the start? Well, boy. I I would think that you would be able to to correlate this 1, Tobias, but I would say an emphasis on audio quality. Yes. Absolutely.
[00:21:03] Unknown:
Be being able to improve the, recording method and, you know, my microphone technique as well as realizing during the first few episodes even after I bought an external mic that wasn't actually what was being picked up on the audio. So having a better understanding of how to properly configure my microphone on Linux would have been a nice thing to know at the start. Yeah. It's it's definitely true that, I mean, you know, it it's 1 of those things that, like, if you're gonna do a podcast,
[00:21:27] Unknown:
invest in a mic. They're not that expensive. I mean, I think my, you know, blue snowball was, like, $50 or something like that. It's not a huge amount of money, and it helps a lot. It really does. And just sort of think through how that's gonna work and make test recordings and play them and play them for other people. And, really, you're just gonna save yourself an awful lot of pain. I still think about early on that gentleman who was an audio production engineer who was just so unhappy because the audio was so terrible. And I can't blame him. You know? It's it's it's 1 of those things where I kinda totally get it right because it's like us as software engineers when we go and look, you know, watch a movie, and they're putting up, like, fake code on the screen. We're just like, oh god. This is just so painful. I'm sure it must be very similar. You must be just like, new people. What are you doing? So, yeah, that's that's been a big 1. The audio quality is a big 1. And I would say another big 1 is just sort of be aware of what kind of time commitment it is when you first start out. Because, you know, you think, oh, I'll just do this podcast. It's not be any big deal. And then you learn about editing, and you learn about the amount of time that it takes to coordinate with guests and get guests and scheduling.
[00:22:39] Unknown:
And it is a lot of work. It's totally worth it, but it's it it is an awful lot of work. It's a big commitment. No question about it. Yeah. And I'll definitely second the audio quality. I've been focusing a lot more lately both on better microphone technique as well as researching more about how to improve the editing process. Yeah. Another thing that I kinda wish I knew at the beginning was how to more effectively market the podcast. And, you know, now that I've actually moved the feed to a new site where I have more control over the download statistics and all that kind of stuff. I wish I had had had a little bit more foresight in terms of having better control of that information from the beginning because now I'm trying to figure out a way to get a data dump from my previous podcast host as to how I can get all the raw metrics so that I can import it into my new tools. But, you know, it's just 1 of those things where you live and learn. And if I can't get it, so be it. But it would certainly be nice to have. So having more control over every aspect of the podcast is useful, but it can also mean extra work. So it's it's 1 of those trade offs. Another thing that would have been nice to know when we first started is how to have a more conversational interview style, because the first few episodes were very stiff, and we would come up with a long list of questions and just read them off verbatim and not really have a very good flow. You know, I think we still got some decent information out of it, but being able to just use the questions as more of a general guide and be more ad hoc in terms of the conversational style has been great. Yeah, the first few episodes, like, I listened to our introduction episode recently or started to listen to it, and it was just so incredibly painful. So painful. It's like we were so wooden. So, Tobias, what do you think? It's like it's really, really bad. I just wanna say, as far as a more conversational interview style, I was actually just yesterday listening to your interview with Klaw Islam, and it struck me
[00:24:29] Unknown:
how much your interview style in particular has evolved. You really did a great job sort of keeping the questions rolling and keeping it very organic and keeping it flowing. So you really you've come a long way. I think it's fantastic. I appreciate that. Yeah. We we both learned a lot, to be sure. As I read it very woodenly, how has the production process evolved since the beginning of the show? Okay.
[00:24:55] Unknown:
It is very different from when we started to now. So when we first started, we recorded directly just using Skype. I think we used Audacity to start, but I don't remember exactly. But I was handling all of the editing, all the recording, all the scheduling. And fairly early on, I think it was probably something in the range of episodes, you know, between 10 15 or so that my wife actually took over doing all the editing. So every episode, every week that has been put out since that time, so upwards of a year and a half by now, has actually been edited and produced by my wife. And so she's definitely been gaining a lot of experience with that.
She's been working hard to make sure that the episodes come out on time and with good quality even when I do a bad job of my microphone technique or do bad job of making sure that all the episode files are where they're supposed to be, she's been keeping me in line. That's great. Yeah. We've also evolved the scheduling aspects of it where to begin with, I would just send emails back and forth between all the guests and you and I till we finally agreed on a date. And after a little while of that, we found a tool called byte dot in, which we've mentioned on the show before that we use for handling all the scheduling to make it a little bit more hands off where you just create an invitation, and then people can vote on times when they're available until there's, you know, 1 agreed upon time. So that's made things pretty painless on that front. Organizing everything into a Trello board was something that we did fairly flow of where different episodes are in the pipeline as well as, flow of where different episodes are in the pipeline as well as a bit of a CRM as far as who's been contacted and when and what the status is of the, you know, scheduling or where where the communication is at. So I've been handing over more of that to my wife as far as the research for contact information and the scheduling aspects. The other thing that's different is for quite a while, up until just recently, we've been using a static site for the website.
You know, we've been using Pelican for generating the website and hosting all the media on Podbean, which is a paid hosting provider. And just recently I actually just this weekend flipped the feed over to the new website. I'm using a WordPress site with the Podlove plugin, and that's actually been pretty great. It's a really well built plugin for being able to manage the episodes and provide a lot of extra metadata and information so that it displays better in things like iTunes. Few episodes ago, we interviewed Kyle Martin about the Podbuzz tool for being able to sort of prompt people to provide reviews on iTunes and be able to aggregate other reviews across the different geographical regions that Itunes is available in. So that's been useful. So just generally being a bit more professional as far as the overall production process and quality of the show and trying to market it a little bit more effectively, which is another place that having the WordPress site comes in handy because it makes it easier to tie in different bits of automation. So as we progress, I'm hoping to add in even more polish and automation to the overall process. Right now, I'm still sort of holding things together with bailing wire and twine, but I wanna get it to the point where it's, you know, upload the episode, copy over the show notes, and press a button, and everything's all set. And, we're making good progress on that front.
[00:28:10] Unknown:
That's awesome. Yeah. It's it's kinda funny. So many people in our industry like to really just rank on WordPress. Oh, it's in secure. It's this, it's that. But the bottom line is, you know, I ran my blog on it for years, and it it just it drives like a Cadillac. You really just cannot beat its user experience. And it's versatility, you know, as as far as, like you said, all of the amazing plug ins and extensions that have been written for it for all kinds of applications and and the the amount that you get sort of for free out of box. Right? Like, you know, it helps you do SEO for your site. And it's just I mean, it's a really impressive platform, and I really wish people who give it a hard time would give it more credit for what it is. I mean, you wanna take potshots at it with regards to security. I'm not a security expert, so I can't say. But at least recognize that it does certain things very, very well. It is the success that it is for a reason.
[00:29:04] Unknown:
Yeah. I I was pretty snobbish about it for a while and didn't wanna use WordPress because it wasn't Python, and I wanted to write my own thing. I even looked around at different CMS tools for Python to try and build something out, and I had a couple of false starts building something with Wagtail that, you know, if I had the time and energy to do it, I I'm sure I could build something fabulous with Wagtail because it's a great project. But I just don't have the time to dedicate to that because the podcast well, I you know, much as I love it and much as I love building it, it is not my full time job. So Right. Right. I don't I don't have the luxury of being able to just spend all my time building out and, you know, hand tuning a custom application. And so being able to just stand up a WordPress site, add a few plugins, and configure them, and have something that does everything I needed to do is pretty fabulous.
[00:29:50] Unknown:
Absolutely. And I think there's a lot of wisdom, honestly, in not reinventing the wheel. Right? Like, I mean, just because we love Python and we love building things in Python, doesn't mean that for every use case that we may have, that we should use Python even if it kills us. Right? Yep. It's the zen of Python. Pragmatism beats purity. Precisely. Exactly. And this is a great example of that. So the next thing that we wanted to talk about is the fact that, I'll be leaving the show after this episode. It's been an incredible 1 that we've had. Like, how many episodes did we produce together? It had to be I'm trying to see I'm trying now I'm going for the list. It had to be We just put out episode 81, and you've been on the vast majority of them. So Yeah. Yeah. You've probably put out something in the range of about 60 episodes with me. Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say, absolutely. So that's that's pretty a pretty incredible achievement for a podcast given that most of them, you know, pod fade after a year or something like that. And we've been, keeping it going for for a while longer than that. And you're gonna keep cranking with it. So that's fantastic. I I feel like we've done a lot of really good work together. And the truth is that I, you know, started a few months ago with Amazon Web Services. And, you know, despite the the bad press that it's gotten, the New York Times article, whatever, it is not a death march by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a very intense place to work. You are working with people who are at the top of their game. The standards are very high. And I am I will freely admit that I am giving it my all and and growing and learning a tremendous amount just by being there and by striving to attain the standards that are that are in place there. And I totally love doing the podcast, but it's also kind of a relief to me to not have to simply in terms of time, not have to do it anymore. So I think this is a perfect opportunity for me to move on and for Tobias to take the reins, and I think he is doing a great job with the last few episodes. As I mentioned, I think the KLR's lawn episode is fantastic. I I know he's a lot busier these days, which makes it even tougher to do a 2 person podcast because you got a coordination to coordinating with guests. You have to coordinate with each other and, like, you know, for me, I'm on call sometimes and, you know, sometimes I just because of meetings or whatever, I just can't do it. So I think I think this makes all the sense in the world. And, you know, I I still love the show. I plan to support the show going forward and do whatever I can because it's a really I'm still invested in podcast. I'm in it, basically, at least emotionally. And, also, you know, I feel like, who knows? There may be a future in which I do a show of my own. I I kind of have the idea rolling this idea rolling around. I know a lot of people say that, going deep technically in podcast format won't work, and maybe it won't. But, it's not gonna happen immediately because as I said, I'm I really need to devote all my energies to sort of coming up to speed as an Amazonian as they like to as we like to call ourselves. But, hopefully, there will come a time when I have the resources to try this on my own. And when that happens, I think a show of, you know, strictly technical deep dives can be really cool experiment to try. Maybe it'll work. Maybe, you know, like, people say it's gonna be horribly boring, and people will tell me to stop torturing them. Who knows? It'll be worth it'll be an interesting experiment.
[00:33:02] Unknown:
Yeah. It's been great having you on the show. It was definitely nice having somebody to, work with as we got the show off the ground and, you know, built it up to what it is today. So I definitely appreciate the time and effort that you put into it, you know. And I definitely look forward to producing more episodes and generating more great content with all of our wonderful guests so that you continue to have something to listen to. This podcast is definitely at the top of my queue.
[00:33:28] Unknown:
You you make my workouts an awful lot more interesting.
[00:33:32] Unknown:
So for people who want to follow what you're up to and,
[00:33:35] Unknown:
reach out and contact you if they wish, what are the best ways for them to do that? Well, all my contact information, I use the about dot me service. So it's about dot me slash feoh. That's f as in Fred, echo Oscar hotel. And all my information there, my Twitter, my, you know, my blog, my email address, You name it. It's all there. I would love to hear from you if you especially if you, if you wanna talk about the podcast or, you know, or you wanna reach me or or you like the idea of a technical deep dive, podcast, definitely let me know. I would love to hear about it. And, yeah, that's that's the easiest way to get to get in touch with me and to to keep rest of what I'm doing. Alright. Well,
[00:34:17] Unknown:
with that, I will move to the picks. I'm gonna just gonna pick 1 today. It's a project called Locust, and it's a load testing tool written in Python for being able to write scripts to define the artificial user interactions for an HTTP service. It also supports other protocols if you wanna write adapters for it. So for instance, if you wanted to do, you know, JSON RPC or SOAP, you could do that as well. But it's primarily intended for HTTP clients. And I've actually been using it for load testing an app that we've been building at work where I am at the office of digital learning at MIT. And it's been really useful for being able to determine what kind of load the service can handle given a particular set of resources for the web host and seeing where things fall apart. So we've been using that to button up some of the low hanging fruit to get it ready for production. It's been a great experience to use it. So I definitely recommend people check it out if they need to, you know, hammer an HTTP host and see where it falls down. And with that, I'll pass it to you, Chris. Very cool. So my first pick is something called stash, a shell for Pythonista.
[00:35:22] Unknown:
We when we spoke to we never managed to get them on the show, but I I I've definitely picked Pythonista here in the past. It is a really great Python environment slash IDE for your iOS device. I think it works great in iPad. It also works on an iPhone. But to me, playing you know, writing code in an iPad is just a really great especially with a keyboard, is a really great experience. And Stash sort of, takes Pythonista, which by default is kind of a sealed environment and, enables you to install things via PIP into your into your iOS device. And it also even provides a Git client so you can pull things down from GitHub. It is a really neat project, so that's my that's my first pick. My next pick is producing a podcast. It is definitely 1 of those things that, you know, where it will take time, but you will get out of it definitely much more than you put into it. It's it's totally worth it. I recommend that anybody who feels like they have something to say and feels like there's a niche that needs filling, go give it a try and do it. And my last pick is the Python community because it has been really incredible opportunity interacting with such a great group of people. I really hope to get to PyCon 1 of these years. I'm even hoping this year. We'll see if it happens. But, but, even just being involved with with, the Python Boston meetup has been a really great experience.
It's been great. It's been great for me personally. It's been great for my career. So thank you to this awesome community. Well, thank you again for joining us this 1 last time, Chris, and,
[00:36:51] Unknown:
look forward to speaking with you outside of the podcast and bumping into you around Boston. So, thanks, and, thanks for all your help up to date. Absolutely. It's been a pleasure. I I will indeed see you around.
Introduction and Sponsor Mentions
Hosts Reintroduce Themselves
Journey with Python
Unexpected Aspects of the Show
Favorite Episodes and Guests
Guests for Longer Conversations
Personal Impact of the Show
Lessons Learned
Evolution of Production Process
Chris's Departure and Future Plans
Picks of the Week
