Episódio 80: Kenneth Reitz - Python Requests

Kenneth Reitz - Python Requests

Olá pessoal e sejam bem-vindos à mais um episódio do Castálio Podcast!

Nosso convidado de hoje é o criador do Python Requests: HTTP para Humanos, atualmente trabalha no Heroku com um título bem interessante, PythonOverLord, possui uma coleção incrível de fotos no Instagram, e possui seu próprio Import This podcast. Ele também escreveu o "Hitchhiker's Guide to Python", um livro de boas práticas em Python que foi, coincidentemente publicado pela O'Reilly em Setembro e todo o lucro das vendas está sendo doado para a fundação Django Girls. Alem disso, possui muito projetos interessantes em sua página no Github. É com grande prazer que trazemos uma entrevista, em inglês, com o Kenneth Reitz.

Vamos fazer um post um pouco diferente hoje, fizemos a apresentação em português e, de agora em diante, o post será todo em inglês. Por favor, deixe-nos comentários sobre o que achou desse formato de post.

Hello everyone and welcome to Castálio Podcast!

Our guest for today's episode is the creator of Python Requests: HTTP for Humans, currently works at Heroku with a pretty cool title, PythonOverLord, has an amazing collection of pictures on his Instagram feed, hosts his own Import This podcast. He also wrote the "Hitchhiker's Guide to Python", which is a Python Best Practices Guidebook (which coincidentally was just published recently by O’Reilly in September and all proceeds from sales are being donated directly to the Django Girls Foundation!) and many other interesting projects which can be seen by visiting his Github profile page. It is with great pleasure that we welcome Kenneth Reitz to our podcast!

We all know Kenneth from his great programming skills and great Python libraries, but maybe not everyone know how he started programming. As you can imagine, we had to talk about that. We started talking about how he started programming and his first projects. He told us about SplashWear, which was his very first user-facing software. SplashWear features:

  • A glorious splash screen.
  • A pc-speaker theme song.
  • A colored DOS shell with customizable prompt.
  • A glimpse into the matrix.
  • Lots of easter eggs.

The project is available on Github at kennethreitz/SlashWear and, thanks for the folks over at the Internet Archive, you can run SplashWear in your web browser

Next we talked about how he started programming in Python. It was interesting to hear that he was in doubt between Computer Science, Photograph and Music. Thankfully, to us, he picked Computer Science and decided to do Photograph and Music on the side. He had his first Python experience on the Computer Science course. He liked everything about Python but Classes, as he got stuck on understanding how it works. He continued studying Python and, suddenly, one day, everything made sense about Python.

We then talked about how Kenneth is involved with other communities and other programming languages. Basically he is only involved with Python community and he stressed that he really cares about Python currently. Then we talked about his cool title at Heroku as PythonOverLord (not PythonLord as we thought) and what that means as a role. Then he told us how he finds time to take pictures and the good news is that he works from home and that helps him find time to take those pictures, which makes him relax and be a better worker.

It could not be an episode with Kenneth if we did not talk about Python Requests. We talked about how Python Requests started and how it evolved into what it is today. It is worth to mention that Kenneth is really thankful for all the love Requests receives and the importance it has to the community. We from Castálio Podcast, and we hope our listeners too, are very thankful to Kenneth for building it.

As it was still fresh when we recorded our previous episode, we talked about some polemic opinions about Python 3. Kenneth does not like it personally but accepted it as the Python future, mostly because he liked how strings worked on Python 2. That was not just an opinion since he told us how he thought would be better to fix the strings and default encoding issue. Also he thinks that learning Python 3 is a little bit harder since how bytes type works is a little abstract as a computer science project. Finally, in his opinion, if you are starting a project today, do it it Python 3.

We also talked about pipfile which is a project that he is working with Donald Stufft. The pipfile is under active development (and design) and there is no code written so far but the README file shows examples and how it should look like when implemented. They are doing the project this way to collect feedback from the community to make sure that they get it right!

The final thing we talked about was Kenneth's music, specially his first album published, Unmastered Impulses, which "contains tracks inspired by esoteric spiritual and philosophical concepts, explorations into the dream state, bipolar disorder, and a traumatic relationship". Kenneth talked about his passion for music, how he got started and what inspired him to create the album. The conversation continued and he also commented about how he built the album artwork. To close this conversation, we talked about Kenneth's synthesizers and the music live streams he does on Facebook.

Unmastered Impulses by Infinite State - Album Artwork

We had a great chat with Kenneth and in the end we sked him for his Top 5 recommendations for books, music, and movies.

Before we end this post, we want to thank all the listeners who left comments. Feel free to leave any comment below, on our Twitter or Facebook page.

See you all on our next episode!

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