Python core developer. Tall, snarky Canadian.
Visit snarky.ca → RSS feedOn Hacker News Nov 2015 – Oct 2025
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This month I invited to Q&A at PuPPy [https://youtu.be/2XviXtxWKO8?list=PL4S0lvhXvdhIV2C28Ia_DeIeloBrsQBOW] (the Puget Sound Python users group) that eventually led to me explaining why Python 3 came into existence and the whole string/bytes deal. I ended up receiving a compliment on the explanation which
After needing to do a deep dive on the venv module (which I will explain later in this blog post as to why), I thought I would explain how virtual environments work to help demystify them. Why do virtual environments exist? Back in my the day, there was no concept
Why ask this question? It's no secret that I want a Python implementation for WebAssembly [https://webassembly.org/]. It would not only get Python into the browser, but with the fact that both iOS [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/javascriptcore] and Android [https://developer.android.com/guide/webapps]…
Fellow core developer and Canadian, Mariatta, asked on Twitter about python -m pip and who told her about that idiom along with asking for a reference explaining it: I learned sometime ago that we should be doing `python -m pip install ...` instead of simply `pip install ...` but now I can'
Recently on Twitter there was a maintainer of a Python project who had a couple of bugs filed against their project due to builds failing (this particular project doesn't provide wheels, only sdists). Eventually it came out that the project was using a pyproject.toml file because that's
(This is the blog post version of my keynote from EuroPython 2025 in Prague, Czechia.) We now have a lock file format specification. That might not sound like a big deal, but for me it took 4 years of active work to get us that specification. Part education, part therapy,
The Kübler-Ross model [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model] outlines the stages that one goes through in dealing with death: 1. Denial 2. Anger 3. Bargaining 4. Depression 5. Acceptance This is sometimes referred to as the five stages of grief.Some have jokingly called