This week we welcome Paul Ganssle (@pganssle) as our PyDev of the Week. Paul is the maintainer of the dateutil package and also a maintainer of the setuptools project. You can catch up with Paul on his website or check out some of his talks. Let’s take a few moments to get to know Paul better!
Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc):
One thing that sometimes surprises people is that I started out my career as a chemist. I have a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. After that, I worked for two years building NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) devices for use in oil wells. In 2015 I was looking for a career with a bit more flexibility in terms of location and I made the switch to software development; one thing that is nice about the software industry is that tech companies are not afraid to hire people with non-traditional backgrounds if they know how to code.
I have the typical assortment of “hacker” and “autodidact” hobbies – learning languages, picking locks, electronics projects, etc. One of my favorite projects (which has unfortunately fallen a bit by the wayside) is my HapticapMag, a haptic compass that I built into a hat. I had it up and working for 2 or 3 weeks, but some parts broke and I never got around to fixing it. My tentative plan is to start up some new electronics projects in 4-5 years when my son is old enough to be interested in that sort of thing.
Why did you start using Python?
I have two origin stories for this, actually. The more boring one is that around 2008 a friend of mine told me about this cool and increasingly popular programming language called Python that I should definitely learn, and I sort of picked it up and started using it for little system automation tasks.
What really got me into Python, though, was when I illustrated some point I was making in a forum post using a graph that I had made in Matlab and someone complained about the terrible aliasing in the plot and suggested I use matplotlib instead. I tried it out and the plots were so much better that I was instantly hooked. After that, I moved everything I could over from Matlab to Python and never looked back.
What other programming languages do you know and which is your favorite?
It’s hard to say when you “know” a programming language, but the programming languages I’m most confident with are C++, C, and Rust (and probably some others like Matlab that I haven’t used in years but once knew pretty well). I can write enough Javascript to get by, but to say I know it would be kind of like saying I speak Spanish because I can order a beer and ask where the bathroom is.
At the moment, I’m very excited about Rust, which is a memory-safe systems programming language targeting the use cases where C and C++ currently predominate. One of the very nice things about Rust is that there is a very enthusiastic community out there and it already has a flourishing ecosystem of third-party packages, which I think is one reason there’s a lot of excitement about Rust in the Python community.
Thank you for asking me to do this interview and thanks to all the readers who’ve indulged my verbosity by reading all the way to the end.
…Thanks for doing the interview, Paul!
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