Carl Trachte: Mining Engineer Turned Geek

Another #LABHR post.

I first met Carl when he came to a training session for new PyCon speakers. He was very nervous, and concerned that his topic would not be of sufficient interest to his audience. I made a point of attending the beginning of his talk, and by the time I left there was no doubt in my mind that Carl would do well in the Python community.

Over the years he has done invaluable work for the PSF, both in policing potential abuses of the Foundation's trademark for the Python programming language, and also in collecting sample descriptions of Python in many languages and alphabets to try and make Python's web presence more welcoming to those from diverse linguistic communities.

He has been a PyCon volunteer for a while now, helping others to find what they need and demonstrating by example the helping spirit of Python and open source generally.

Carl has done all this with no thought of return, and in doing them has helped uncountable numbers of Python users. Well done, Carl, and thanks!

Brian Curtin: A Solid Record of Community Involvement

As a personal #LABHR contribution (having already thanked recipients of PSF awards) I should like to bring to your attention a person by the name of Brian Curtin.

If you are part of the Django world you may know Brian from his work with his then-local Chicago group, though he latterly moved to San Antonio. He has been featured as a Python core developer in the Python Insider blog, and more recently in Mike Driscoll's Pydev of the Week column.

Brian also contributes by serving as a Director of the Python Software Foundation, that worthy body charged with responsibility for the intellectual property in the Python programming language and in growing the international Python community. He is in essence its voice, having for a long time been the Foundation's Communications Officer. Though many others contribute from time to time, they do so under Brian's editorship, and I know from personal experience he is a great editor to work with.

Brian has also spoken and volunteered at PyCon on a long-term basis. I can't think of a single area he's touched without making a contribution of some kind.

So thanks, Brian, for making a difference, and good luck in your most recent role with Rackspace in San Antonio.

Building a Hat Rack

Leslie Hawthorn, Elastic Search’s enthusiastic communities manager, has been involved with open source for quite a while, and has come up with what seems to be a good idea. She's trying to get public acknowledgment for services to open source that often go unsung, and I recommend that you read her blog post and take action on it yourself under hashtag #LABHR (Let's all build a hat rack). I certainly shall be doing, and this is the first of my actions. I gather the intention is to show developers some love on Valentine's Day to start with, but it would be amazing if this could become a continuous process.

It was in the spirit of "building a hat rack" in the sense of making achievements visible that I first proposed the Python Software Foundation present Community Service Awards to deserving members of the community. The prize bestows a free place at PyCon to recipients, but mostly the certificate simply represents recognition that a group of your peers have recognized your efforts, which have typically been long-term and beneficial to a broad cross-section of many Python communities. Recipients are listed on the python.org web site.

More recently the Foundation introduced Distinguished Service awards, of which so far there have been two recipients.

If you have anything to do with Python at all, even if you are “merely” a Python user, the selfless actions of these people have impacted your life in a huge way over the last 25 years, and I hope you are grateful to them, as I am.

How to Get the Bits of Python You Need Where You Want Them

Following up my recent short video on installing Anaconda I now introduce miniconda, which is a distribution that contains only Python and the conda software on which Anaconda is based. The remainder of the Python packages you need can be installed in virtual environments managed by conda.

When you are building Python systems with mundane requirements this is a great way to put your environments together. From my experience so far it's professionally built and unusually well engineered. Kudos to Continuum Analytics for getting this stuff out.

How to Get Almost All the Python You Might Need

I am often asked what is the easiest way to build Python environments. For development purposes it's most convenient to have a "batteries included" environment that can be pared down once development is over. Continuum Analytics have for a while offered an open source project called Anaconda to provide easy access to both Python and the batteries.

If you are a Python professional and you get questions from people who would like to try the language I would suggest that the graphical installer would be most appropriate. For anyone familiar with the command line, the command-line installer is not only slightly smaller but allows the scripted creation of disposable Python environments which you can activate just by adding their bin subdirectory at the start of your path.

The video should explain this in detail.

In the video I create a disposable environment under /tmp. Anaconda environments are far heavier than a standard virtual environment, but they offer a huge variety of Python libraries without ever having to understand the complexities of package installation.

[For a more selective installation utility see How to Get the Bits of Python You Need Where You Want Them]