Chase Seibert

Director of Engineering at Dropbox

View all #2012pythonmeme posts by the community.

1. What’s the coolest Python application, framework, or library you have discovered in 2012?

Definitely celery. It challenges you to compose your solutions into ever smaller tasks. It’s sometimes frustrating as hell to debug (mostly because it’s naturally UI-less). But it has been an absolutely essential piece of several large projects in the last year.

2. What new programming technique did you learn in 2012?

Monkey patching. After a couple years of using Python as if it was Java, I finally started to grok the power of a dynamic language in 2012. I then proceeded to perhaps over-use it, by over-writing python internals, reaching into framework internals, replacing code in memory at runtime and fabricating look-alike objects.

3. Which open source project did you contribute to the most in 2012? What did you do?

I had a couple of patches for celery and encouraged a co-worker to contribute back to Django. But mostly I open-sourced a couple of new things I was working on, django-pyfixtures and django-nose-lint.

4. Which Python blog or website did you read the most in 2012?

In terms of volume, it was the Reddit’s r/python. But in terms of value, it would have to be my twitter steam.

5. What are the top things you want to learn in 2013?

I need to re-engage on client side technologies, which have made tremendous progress in the last couple of years while I’ve been focussed on server-side stuff. I’m particularly interesting in actually using stuff like backbone, node.js and meteorjs in production.

6. What is the top software, application, or library you wish someone would write in 2013?

An open-source replacement for Splunk. I’ve rarely used a product so well designed and functional. Yet I can’t deal with the high cost and licensing headaches anymore.