Behind the Commit

What does a PhD in Astrophysics have in common with the software running in your car, your coffee machine, and NASA’s internal tools? In this episode I sit down with Cristian Maureira-Fredes, a Research and Development Principal Manager at The Qt Company. Cristian leads the team behind Qt for Python (PySide6) and the Qt Core team.

In this episode, I'm chatting with Maria Ashna — PyPI support specialist at the Python Software Foundation and founder of Magic Lightbulb, a tech and product consulting firm. PyPI serves nearly a million developers and is the backbone of Python's entire package ecosystem — maintained by a team of just four people. Maria shares what her role actually looks like day to day, how she cleared a backlog...

In this upcoming episode, I chat with Maria Ashna, PyPI support specialist at the Python Software Foundation. We discuss what it's actually like to support nearly a million Python developers with a team of four, the edge cases nobody thinks about, and what PyPI was called before it was PyPI. Full episode coming out soon!

Antonio Cuni (principal engineer at Anaconda, author of SPy, developer of PyScript and PyPy, co-founder of the HPy project, and creator of PDB++, Fancy Completer, and VMProf) shares why Python is slow and how SPy, a new statically compiled variant of Python, aims to be as fast as C while staying as Pythonic as Python. We discuss the trade-off between dynamic features and performance, how SPy's "re...

In this upcoming episode, I chat with Antonio Cuni, the creator of SPy and long-time PyPy developer. We discuss why Python is slow, how a statically compiled Python variant can be as fast as C while still feeling Pythonic, and the "red and blue" model behind SPy's compilation pipeline. Full episode coming out soon!

In this episode, I'm chatting with Anthony Sottile — creator of pre-commit, primary maintainer of flake8, core contributor to pytest, and maintainer of around 80 open source projects across the Python ecosystem. He's also a GitHub Star and a popular live coding streamer on Twitch under the name "anthonywritescode". We dig into how he actually manages all of it, the origin story of pre-commit, the...

In this upcoming episode, I chat with Anthony Sottile — creator of pre-commit and maintainer of around 80 open source projects. We talk about how he actually manages it all, the surprising bugs he's found in NPM and Git along the way, and the psychological side of open source that nobody talks about.

Armin Ronacher (creator of Flask, previously Sentry’s VP of Platform, and currently founder of a startup Earendil) shares his experience building a startup where 90% of the code is AI-generated. We discuss which programming languages work best with AI agents, why Python's ecosystem makes life harder for AI, and what skills programmers need to stay relevant in the age of AI. Outline 00:00 Episode h...

In this upcoming episode, I chat with Armin Ronacher, the creator of Flask. We discuss which programming languages work best with AI agents, why Python's ecosystem makes life harder for both humans and AI, and what skills programmers need to stay relevant in the age of AI.

In this episode, I talk with Mateusz Modrzejewski, a professional musician and AI researcher and assistant professor at the Warsaw University of Technology, about AI-generated music: how it works, what artists think about it, the big copyright questions, and where AI tools can genuinely support the creative process instead of replacing it. Outline 00:00 Episode highlights and introduction 00:49 Th...

AI-generated music is on the rise, but what does that mean from a technical and creative perspective? In this upcoming episode, I talk with Mateusz Modrzejewski, a professional musician and AI researcher, about AI-generated music: how it works, what artists think about it, the big copyright questions, and where AI tools can genuinely support the creative process instead of replacing it.

In this episode, I’m chatting with Thibaud Colas — Product Lead & Engineering Manager at Torchbox, Wagtail product lead, and current President of the Django Software Foundation. We talk about digital sustainability: why the internet’s energy use matters, how to measure it, why performance is important for emissions, whether rewriting everything in Rust is the only solution, and why we should k...

What is digital sustainability and why does it matter? In this upcoming episode, I chat with Thibaud Colas, Product Lead & Engineering Manager at Torchbox, Wagtail product lead, and current President of the Django Software Foundation. We talk about digital sustainability: why the internet’s energy use matters, how to measure it, why performance is important for emissions, whether rewriting eve...

In this episode, I’m chatting with Sebastián Ramírez — the creator of FastAPI, Typer, and SQLModel, and founder of FastAPI Labs. FastAPI has become one of Python’s fastest-growing web frameworks (adoption jumped from 14% to 25% among developers between 2021 and 2023!), and we dig into how it got here and what’s next on the roadmap. Sebastián shares behind-the-scenes insights into its success, his...

FastAPI has become one of Python’s fastest-growing web frameworks! In this upcoming episode, I chat with Sebastián Ramírez, the creator of FastAPI, Typer, and SQLModel, and founder of FastAPI Labs. We talk about why FastAPI became so popular, the challenges of maintaining a fast-growing open source project, and what’s next for FastAPI and FastAPI Cloud. Full episode coming out next week!

Have you ever wondered how a CPython release works? In this episode, I talk with Hugo van Kemenade, Pablo Galindo Salgado, and Łukasz Langa about CPython release management. About the guests Hugo van Kemenade – Release Manager for Python 3.14 & 3.15, currently employed at the Sovereign Tech Agency as a fellow. Maintainer of open-source projects such as Pillow. Co-organizer of local Python even...

Sneak peak of the episode about CPython release. Have you ever wondered how a CPython release works? In this episode, we talk with Hugo van Kemenade, Łukasz Langa, and Pablo Galindo Salgado about Python release management. About the guests Hugo van Kemenade – Release Manager for Python 3.14 & 3.15, currently employed at the Sovereign Tech Agency as a fellow. Maintainer of open-source projects...