PyDev of the Week: Jeff Forcier

• I’ve a bachelor’s degree in computer science (though I don’t hold with those who think one is required for a career in this field.)
• Most of my hobbies involve a computer or TV screen – for example, I’m a devout video game addict, spend more time than I should just surfing the Web, and enjoy watching video (anime, movies, TV; no Twitch habit yet!)
• When not glued to a display, I read a lot (mostly scifi & fantasy); take day trips around the beautiful, if disturbingly expensive, San Francisco Bay Area; and annoy my cats.
• Sometimes I combine these things – such as when my wife and I go on long walks playing Pokémon Go 🙂

I enjoy Ruby; my ideal language would be Python with some Ruby syntax (blocks, trailing logic, etc) or Ruby with a more explicit import system and Python’s package ecosystem (i.e. not limited to mostly web and ops.) At the moment everything I’m working with is Python, so my Ruby is gathering dust.

Fabric 2 and its underlying Invoke project are my primary foci right now. My time’s spent eyeballing the requirements for their 2.0 and 1.0 releases, respectively; and personal itch-scratching feature work. I’m privileged to use a lot of this OSS at my day job, so I allow myself tangents when something annoys me, or my users, enough.

Strongly related: Paramiko, which has high-priority feature areas needing a serious redo (like auth handling) on top of the usual ‘missing’ features and fixes.

Finally, I’ve been porting my test suites to a pytest-based test runner; the old one I used was based on nose and pytest has gotten so much neat stuff in the past few years, I made the jump. Plus the rewrite allowed for quality-of-life improvements on top of simply “you can use other pytest plugins with it”!

I submitted a large (pre-Github) PR that turned it into a multi-file package, made it more like a traditional POSIX app, and added some features; as it turns out, Christian was at a turning point on his end and asked if I just wanted the project wholesale. I said yes. 0.9.x was born; and we’re now up to 1.13, with a full-rewrite 2.0 around the corner.

Paramiko has powered Fabric since the beginning; about 5 years into my Fabric stewardship, I forked Paramiko (around 1.7.7) to publish critical bugfixes Paramiko’s author (Robey) hadn’t time to merge. He eventually got back to me and asked if I wanted to take over the original. I said yes and merged my fork back in. Since then, I’ve published versions 1.7.7.x through 1.18, then a (non-rewrite) 2.0, 2.1, etc.

Alabaster started life as a (non-hostile) fork of Kenneth Reitz’s Sphinx theme, which in turn was a gentle rework of Armin Ronacher’s theme for his projects. Alabaster’s intent was to add a lot of configurability to the theme package, for example making it easier to use across multiple sites (as I do with most of my projects’ split www/docs sites.) It’s now the default Sphinx theme!

Making matters worse are my tendencies towards micromanagement and pickiness – they’ve prevented me from giving out full commit/release privileges to others, which would help get more patches out more quickly.

That said, I have a handful of awesome folks who help with ticket triage/patch review; I still feel compelled to at least skim nearly every ticket, but seeing a trusted name in the comments makes it much easier to defer, close or just-merge sometimes!

Backwards compatibility (something I take very, perhaps too, seriously – see “pickiness” above) introduces many challenges, not only around how to make certain changes, but also how to handle them in changelogs, release branches, etc.

• Python 3 compatibility, finally.
• Explicit, single-responsibility-principle driven classes instead of functions referencing global module state, which brings a ton of other good stuff like “you can use threads instead of multiprocessing!”
• Massively expanded configuration system.
• POSIX/GNU style command-line flags for task arguments; no more weird custom stuff.
• Command/subprocess execution now way more powerful, more consistent between local/remote, and usable totally standalone (easy-to-use replacement for manual, stdlib subprocess based hacks!)
• Elegant nested SSH gateway support.

• requests and sphinx are near-ubiquitous, for good reason;
• cryptography has been great to work with, and its split high/low level API approach is increasingly valuable as the programming world gets more security-savvy;
• flake8 and coverage are invaluable for code insight;
• humanfriendly (or tqdm), tabulate, & blessings all make for attractive user interfaces (spinners, progress bars, tables, colors) – a feature area I’m increasingly utilizing;
• pathlib, which I should use more than I do;
• httpie is amazing for introspecting anything web/http based on the CLI.

• Execution speed: Golang is hard to beat, but PyPy’s doing good work, and optional typing in Python 3 can only help (also just for those who like typing, period.)
• Deploying code: Python justifiably gets a bad rap compared to “copy a static binary”, but the Packaging Authority is doing awesome work and there’s more coming. Wheels are already a huge boon over sdists or eggs.
• Managing dependencies: npm has the benefit of being a next-gen system, with the bells & whistles that entails; but again, the PyPA does great work and I’m excited for upcoming changes (e.g. Pipfile.)
• Async: an increasingly common need in our multi-core age; Golang and JS have strong async paradigms, but Python 3.5+ has made solid gains in native async syntax and hopefully will keep improving (plus the built-in syntax is only one option!)