This week we welcome Benedikt Eggers (@be_eggers) as our PyDev of the Week. Benedikt is one of the core developers working on the IronPython project. IronPython is the version of Python that is integrated with Microsoft’s .NET framework, much like Jython is integrated with Java. If you’re interesting in seeing what Benedikt has been up to lately, you might want to check out his Github profile. Let’s take a few minutes to get to know our fellow Pythoneer!
Could you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc):
My name is Benedikt Eggers and I was born and live in Germany (23 years). I’ve working as a software developer and engineer and had studied business informatics. At my little spare time I do sports and work on open source projects, like IronPython.
Why did you start using Python?
To be honest, I’ve started using Python by searching for a script engine for .net. That way I came to IronPython and established it in our company. There we are using it to extend our software and writing and using Python modules in both worlds. After a while I got more into Python and thought that’s a great concept of a dynamic language. So it’s a good contrast to C#. It is perfect for scripting and other nice and quick stuff.
What other programming languages do you know and which is your favorite?
The language I’m most familiar with is C#. To be honest, this is also my “partly†favorite language to write larger application and complex products. But I also like Python/IronPython very much, cause it allows me to achieve my goals very quickly with less and readable code. So a favorite language is hard to pick, cause I like to use the best technology in its specific environment (Same could be said about relational and document based database, …)
What projects are you working on now?
Mostly I’m working on my projects at work. We (http://simplic-systems.com/) are continuously working on creating more and more open source projects and also contribute to other open source projects. So I spend a lot of time there. But I also can use a lot of this time to work on IronPython. So I’m able to mix this up and work a few projects parallel. But spending time working on IronPython is something I really like, so I’m doing it, cause I enjoy it.
Which Python libraries are your favorite (core or 3rd party)?
I really like requests and all the packages to easily work with web-services and other modern technologies. On the other side, I use a lot of Python Modules in our continuous integration environment, to automate our build process. So there I also use the core libraries to move, rename files by reading JSON configurations and so on. So there are a lot of libraries I like. Because they make my life much easier every day.
Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Yes – I’d love to see how fast we are growing and that we found people who are willing to contribute to IronPython. I think we are on a good way and hope that we can achieve all of our goals. I hope that IronPython 3 and all other releases are coming soon. Furthermore I’d like to thank Jeff Hardy a lot, who has contributed to the project in that past years and is always very helpful. Finally also a thanks goes to Alex Earl who has working on this project too in the last years and now wants to bring it back together with the community. I think we will work great together!
Thanks so much for doing the interview!