Blogs on Alex Gaynor

If you’ve been around an Open Source community for any length of time, you’ve probably heard someone say, “We’re all volunteers here”.

This year was my 7th PyCon, I’ve been to every one since 2008.

When I was younger, I started watching the TV show House M.D., and I really liked it.

People who follow me on twitter or github have probably noticed over the past six months or so: I've been talking about, and working on, cryptography a lot.

In the unlikely event you’re both reading my blog, and have not heard of Travis CI, it’s a CI service which specifically targets open source projects.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been spending a bunch of time on a side project, which is to get better insight into who uses packages from PyPI.

Python community, friends, fellow developers, we need to talk.

I’d like to refer to a hypothetical person in my documentation Try something like this: When a user visits the website, they will be assigned a session ID, and it will be transmitted to them in the HTTP response and stored in their browser.

Whenever the topic of affirmative action comes up, you can be sure someone will ask the question: “How would you feel if you found out that you got your job, or got into college, because of your race?”

This post is intended to describe how open source projects should handle security vulnerabilities.

Let’s start with a definition, a meritocracy is a group where leadership or authority is derived from merit (merit being skills or ability), and particularly objective merit.

If you haven’t already, you should start by reading Wired’s article on this.

Maybe you practice code review, either as a part of your open source project or as a part of your team at work, maybe you don’t yet.

From time to time I joke that Bob Knight stole the title of my autobiography with his, which is titled “The Power of Negativity”.

I just shipped a new release of alchimia.

Friends of mine will know I'm a very big fan of the TV show Sports Night (really any of Aaron Sorkin's writing, but Sports Night in particular).

Having your own open source project is awesome.

I get asked from time to time why I care about diversity in the communities I’m a part of, particularly the Django, Python, and the broader software development and open source community.

Your community appears to be a disaster.

By this point it’s likely you’ve read about the discussion Sarah Sharp started on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) about the abusive nature of some of the comments there, she also wrote about it on her blog.

I get a lot of feedback about people’s experiences with PyPy.

Since I joined Rackspace a little over a month ago, I’ve gotten involved with OpenStack, learning the APIs, getting involved in discussions, and contributing code.

One of the great luxuries of my new job at Rackspace is that basically everything I work on is open source, which means I also have the ability to write and talk about almost everything I do!

As you may have heard by now, I’m joining Rackspace.

I’ve been reading Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In”.

I had a fairly fun project at work recently, so I thought I’d write about it.

I'm trying a new format for content, instead of writing I've recorded some audio, I think this will be a better format for my to share ideas.

At 10:40 AM this morning Linux on the desktop was pronounced dead by Dr.

This is a response to http://pwang.wordpress.com/2012/07/11/does-the-compiler-know-best/ if you haven’t read it yet, start there.

First, I have to apologize, because this post is incredibly self-serving, I believe everything I write here applies to myself, and if you do what I suggest, it will be to my benefit.

5 years, 2 months, and 28 days ago I dropped out of high school, and in a few hours I’m going to graduate from college.

Polyglot programming (the practice of knowing and using many programming languages) seems to be all the rage these days.

Raymond Hettinger recently asked on twitter what people thought del defaultdict()[k] did for a k that didn’t exist in the dict.

I just delivered a talk at RCOS (the open source center on campus) on some of the work I’ve been doing this semester on PyPy’s implementation of NumPy.

At PyCodeConf I had a very interesting discussion with Nick Coghlan which helped me understand something that had long frustrated me with programming languages.

Thinking about writing your own Python implementation?

I gave a talk at DjangoCon Europe 2011 on using Django and PyPy (with another talk to be delivered tomorrow!)

For the past nearly two years I’ve been an independent contractor working primarily for Eldarion, and it’s been fantastic, I can’t say enough good things.

For a long time we, the PyPy developers, have known the Python implementations on the Computer Language Shootout were not optimal under PyPy, and in fact had been ruthlessly microoptimized for CPython, to the detriment of PyPy.

Yesterday was the last day of my (our) tour of the Bay Area, so I figured I’d post a recap of all the cool stuff that happened.

About 18 months ago I blogged about Django and Python 3, I gave the official roadmap.

If you hang out with Pythonistas you’ve probably already heard, but if you haven’t, come to PyCon!

For the past month or so I’ve been using a combination of Google, Stackoverflow, and bugging people on IRC to muddle my way through using various VCS that I’m not very familiar with.

Now that the decades almost over (or maybe not, if the millennium started in 2001 did the decade start then as well?)

tox is a recent Python testing tool, by Holger Krekel.

This semester I’ve been taking a course titled “Programming Languages”.

When you have a cold you treat the symptoms you deal with the runny nose, the fever, and the cough independently (each with chicken soup) because there’s nothing you can do about the cold.

Since I seem to be failing at this blogging thing, tonights post is a simple thought: just because something is imperfect doesn’t mean it sucks.

Nearly a year ago I tweeted, and released on github a project I’d been working.

Testing is important, I’ve been a big advocate of writing tests for a while, however when you’ve got tests you need to run them.