PyDev of the Week: Alex Gaynor

This week we welcome Alex Gaynor (@alex_gaynor) as our PyDev of the Week! Alex writes an interesting Python blog and is on the board of directors for the Python Software Foundation. You can get a feel for the projects that Alex contributes to via his Github page. Let’s spend some time getting to know him better!

Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc):

I’m a software engineer who works for the United States government. I’ve been programming for about 8 years and using Python nearly as long. Open source consumes a lot of my time, but when I’m not programming I’m a big NBA basketball fan. I’m originally from Chicago, and I live in Washington D.C. now.

Why did you start using Python?

I knew only PHP at the time, and after working on a small personal project I was chatting with another developer about a similar project, on a whim I asked them what technologies they were using and they said “Python and Django”, I’d never heard of Django and didn’t know anything about Python back then. I dug in and fell in love.

What other programming languages do you know and which is your favorite?

I’m comfortable working in Python, Ruby, Java, C, C++, Go, Javascript, SQL, and probably some others that I can’t remember. The two languages I reach for most often right now are Python and Go, but I enjoy using Python more.

What projects are you working on now?

Obviously a bunch of internal work stuff. For open source the project that gets most of my time is pyca/cryptography, where we’re working to build a solid and secure crypto library for Python.

Which Python libraries are your favorite (core or 3rd party)?

If I said pyca/cryptography, would I be cheating ;-). I really enjoy Raven, Werkzeug, SQLAlchemy, and python-afl.

Thanks so much!