Interview with Andrei Svetlov about the Python language and not only

    In anticipation of PyCon Russia, we decided to talk with conference speakers about Python, their work and hobbies. The first short interview we took from one of the developers of the Python language Andrei Svetlov.

    Andrey Svetlov - Python Core Developer, author and active participant in many Python libraries, including asyncio , aiohttp , aiopg , aiozmq , author of the popular Python programming language blog , program director and annual speaker of the PyCon Russia conference .


    Andrey Svetlov is the speaker of many python conferences. For example, here is his performance at PyCon-2015


    - How did you come to development in Python?

    - I read an article by David Mertz in 2000 "Learn Python in 2 hours." For two did not work, still teaching. Then there was embedding the interpreter in the game engines, working with the network and, finally, the web.

    - What are you working on now?

    - Libraries for asyncio (this is such a new thing for network programming, part of Python 3). The most important library is aiohttp, and there is still a lot to do around it.

    “What is the best and worst part of your work?”

    “The best thing is to make beautiful code and teach others about it.” The worst is when you have to sacrifice beauty for the sake of business queries. We all understand that programming should solve business problems, but it’s a shame when, for objective reasons, a compelled decision is ugly.

    - What do you consider to be your main achievement in life / career at the moment?

    - Aiohttp and aio-libs libraries. Plus, I'm Python Core Developer, but this is not as important to me as three years ago.

    - In your opinion, in what direction will Python develop in the coming years?

    - “Two” will finally go by the wayside. Three years later, programmers writing in python 2.7 will be looked upon with pity and participation.

    - What, in your opinion, is the most important problem facing the Python developer community now?

    - “Finish” the transition to the “troika”. Everything seems to be clear with this question. Resistance is generally broken. The fact that new projects need to start immediately at the top three is already clear to everyone.

    It is much more interesting that not only Ubuntu and Red Had are moving, but Instagram is planning to transfer its code to the "troika" by the end of the year.

    There are two other eternal topics: GIL and JIT (and generally performance issues). The guys are working, so far there are no high-profile results.

    - What tools do you use to organize work (including for planning time, organizing work space, etc.)?

    - Nothing special: gmail and calendar.

    - Do you read any professional blog? What information resources could you recommend to colleagues for the development of skills?

    - It so happened that the programmer needs to know English. The best Python resource is planetpython.org . I select interesting authors from there and subscribe to them separately.

    Generally for me, RSS feed is the main source of news. I practically do not use Facebook, twitter and the like.

    - What do you like to do when you don't write a code?

    - I read books. I fly to conferences :)
    Right now I’m trying to visit all the seemingly interesting museums of the West Coast of the USA on airplane boats. And look at the nature - it is very different from the usual Ukrainian here.

    - Do you manage to maintain work & life balance? If so, how, if not, do you need it at all?

    - Is it that writing a code 24 hours a day does not work, even with a sleep break?
    That's right, I try to do at least something every day - commit, code review, reply to letters. As a result, the business moves little by little and evenly.



    You can talk with Andrey and ask your questions on July 3-4 at PyCon Russia 2016 . At the conference, Andrei will talk about the library for writing py.test tests. And here are Andrey's performances at PyConRu-2013 , PyconRu-2014 , PyConRu-2015 .

    Also in this year's program: Raymond Hettinger (Python core developer since 2001, author and maintainer of many parts of the language, USA), Martin Gorner (Developer Relations, Google, France), Nathaniel Manista (Computer Scientist, Google, USA), Armin Ronacher (Flask framework, Austria), David MacIver (Hypothesis, Great Britain), Jackie Kazil (Technical Fellow at Capital One, USA), Alexander Sibiryakov (Scrapinghub, Czech Republic), speakers from Yandex, HeadHunter, Rambler & Co - and that's not all.

    The conference program and all the details are on the site .

    Thanks to our sponsors: the General Sponsor - Positive Technologies , the Gold Sponsor - JetBrains , the Silver Sponsor - Rambler & Co , the Bronze Sponsor - Ostrovok.ru .

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