Developer of the week: Katie McLaughlin

This week, we welcome Katie McLaughlin ( @glasnt )! She is a key developer of the BeeWare project. You should take a moment and look at her profile on a githaba to find out what interesting projects she has participated in. Katie also has a small, fun website and was a speaker at PyCon 2016. Let's take a closer look at her!

Can you tell us a little about yourself? (Hobby, education, something else) :

Good day! I am an Australian, I was born in Brisbane, but now I live in Sydney. I received a bachelor's degree in information technology and have been in the IT industry for almost 10 years. I visited many roles and was associated with a bunch of different technologies, but for the most part these were web hosting and cloud technologies. When I'm not at a computer or at a conference, I enjoy cooking and making tapestries.

Why did you start learning Python?

To correct a mistake in a small internal project! It was a bug in the old script, I saw #!/usr/bin/env python and started learning python. I did not return to the python for several years, but later I was invited to speak at PyCon Australia 2015 and I thought that I had to “brush” the little knowledge I had. This was about a year ago and now python is my favorite scripting language. I’ve previously used Ruby for several years and still, though occasionally, typing "puts" instead of "print".

Do you know any other programming languages ​​and which of them is your favorite?

Good question! As for the languages ​​I was paid for - I know JavaScript, Haskell, Scala, C, Python, Ruby, Perl, Bash / Shell, Powerscript, Powershell, PL / SQL, and possibly a few others. Add here a dozen or so languages ​​with which I dealt in high school or at the university (these were mainly Pascal, Lisp, Poplog, Assembly, ActionScript, C #, Java).

But what languages ​​do I really know ? It's a difficult question. Personally, I would define the knowledge of the language as the ability to put it into practice. Give me any language and maybe I could work with it, but the style of writing code would be completely different.

With this in mind, I would say that I know JavaScript, Haskell, Python, Ruby & Bash. #polyglotLife

As for the favorite, in the old days I just adored Poplog. But in reality, I don't use my favorite language everywhere. I use a programming language as part of the environment to solve a specific problem. The use of language in isolation from the environment has not brought anyone any benefit. To work you need to choose the right tool ( emoticon )

What projects are you working on now?

Right now my main project is BeeWare , an open source project where I am a key developer. You may have heard of him as an open project attracting investment . BeeWare is a collection of tools and libraries that allow you to write python applications and distribute them everywhere. Not only in the web environment, but also on Android and iOS platforms.

I'm really excited about what Russell Keith-Magee, the founder and beekeeper of the BeeWare project, was able to achieve by now . A lot of work is being done now, but its results will have a bright future.

I am also a key developer in two other projects: octohatrack - an application that shows the total number of project participants on Github , not just those who contributed with the code to the master; and emojificate is a module for python, as well as a template for Django, which help make using emoji more accessible on the Internet.

Which library in python is your favorite? (Internal or third-party)

I really enjoy the convenience and simplicity of requests. unicodedata is also fun. Although recently I spent too many hours with boto3.

In what niche, in your opinion, does a python move as a programming language?

Python, which is now 25 years old, was originally only a server language. With the advent of Django about 10 years ago, it moved to the web area. And now the python is a major one in other areas, such as education and data science.

However, the python runs the risk of being left behind, as now most of the development is far from the server. And recently, IEEE in its study put python in the top languages, but without solutions for embedded or mobile systems.

BeeWare can solve the problem of the presence of python on mobile platforms, Micropython also covers most of the embedded systems. Both of these projects deserve more attention and work, so that the python remains in trend for many years.

Maybe there is something else that you would like to say?

Python community is amazing! I'm a relative newcomer here, but the community accepted me with open arms - especially the django community - and I feel at home here much more than in any other community. This is just wonderful!

Thank you so much for this interview!