Jesse Jiryu Davis will speak on SCALE Saturday at 1:30 on "How Do Python Coroutines Work?" The SCALE Team caught up with him to ask him a few questions about this presentation.
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?
A: After a decade coding Python, I decided to compound my suffering by switching to C. I work for MongoDB and I continue to contribute to PyMongo, Tornado, asyncio, and the Python standard library, but I also lead the MongoDB C Driver team and spend most of my days getting gray hairs from compiler errors and esoteric memory leaks. I'm passionate about mentoring junior coders, about writing, and about connecting with the community by speaking at conferences and Meetups.
Q: You're giving a talk on "How Do Python Coroutines Work?" Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: Before your very eyes, I will implement an async framework in Python. Not only that--no! I will also implement an async coroutine framework with Python's "yield" keyword that lets us elegantly schedule asynchronous tasks. Look, no callbacks up my sleeves!
Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?
A: It's my first visit. I hope to connect with the Linux community and with fellow open source C library maintainers. I'm experienced as an open-source Python programmer, but the Linux and C programming worlds are new for me, and I want to make new friends.
Q: Why are you so devoted to async, anyway?
A: Async is useful these days because it optimizes for a problem of this era: scaling out to huge numbers of connections. It meets the challenges that Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter face, challenges the web hadn't encountered until now. But the other reason I'm excited about async is, it makes us code in new and creative ways. The excitement you had when you first learned a programming language, or first learned some Computer Science concept: when you learn async coding that kind of excitement returns.
Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
A: Nope. =)
SCALE Team interview by Michelle Klein-Hass