Hi, I'm Alex. I'm a software resilience engineer. I care about building systems that work. I've worked for the government, in the private sector, and on open source. I'm based in Washington, DC.
Visit alexgaynor.net → RSS feedOn Hacker News May 2010 – Oct 2022
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Python community, friends, fellow developers, we need to talk. On December 3rd, 2008 Python 3.0 was first released. At the time it was widely said that Python 3 adoption was going to be a long process, it was referred to as a five year process. We’ve just passed the five year mark.
About seven months ago, I abruptly quit Twitter. Though I’d been thinking about it for a while, ultimately leaving was a snap decision for me. Lately I’ve been reflecting on why I hate Twitter so much.
I’m a frequent critic of memory unsafe languages, principally C and C++, and how they induce an exceptional number of security vulnerabilities. My conclusion, based on reviewing evidence from numerous large software projects using C and C++, is that we need to be migrating our industry to memory safe by default…
Thinking about writing your own Python implementation? Congrats, there are plenty out there 1 , but perhaps you have something new to bring to the table. Writing a fast Python is a pretty hard task, and there’s a lot of stuff you need to keep in mind, but if you’re interested in forging ahead, keep reading!
Complexity in software, whether it’s a programming languages, an API, or a user interface, is generally regarded as a vice. And yet complexity is exceptionally common, even though no one ever sets out to build something complex. For people interested in building easy to use software, understanding the causes of…
Currently the most common implementation of Python is known as CPython, and it’s the version of Python you get at python.org , probably 99.9% of Python developers are using it. However, I think over the next couple of years we’re going to see a move away from this towards PyPy, Python written in Python. This is going…
One of my least favorite kinds of bug is when two different systems are interacting and the result has bad behavior but it’s difficult to say which (if either!) system is at fault. This is one of those stories, about Python’s buffer protocol and Rust’s memory model.
About 18 months ago I blogged about Django and Python 3, I gave the official roadmap. Not a lot has changed since then unfortunately, we’ve dropped 2.3 entirely, 2.4 is on it’s way out, but there’s no 3.X support in core. One fun thing has changed though: I get to help set the roadmap, which is a) cool, b) means the…
There are not a lot of very strong empirical results in the field of programming languages . This is probably because there’s a huge amount of variables to control for, and most of the subjects available to researchers are CS undergraduates. However, I have recently found a result replicated across numerous codebases…