Summary
Every software project is subject to a series of decisions and tradeoffs. One of the first decisions to make is which programming language to use. For companies where their product is software, this is a decision that can have significant impact on their overall success. In this episode Sean Knapp discusses the languages that his team at Ascend use for building a service that powers complex and business critical data workflows. He also explains his motivation to standardize on Python for all layers of their system to improve developer productivity.
Announcements
- Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python’s role in data and science.
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- Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Sean Knapp about his motivations and experiences standardizing on Python for development at Ascend
Interview
- Introductions
- How did you get introduced to Python?
- Can you describe what Ascend is and the story behind it?
- How many engineers work at Ascend?
- What are their different areas of focus?
- What are your policies for selecting which technologies (e.g. languages, frameworks, dev tooling, deployment, etc.) are supported at Ascend?
- What does it mean for a technology to be supported?
- You recently started standardizing on Python as the default language for development. How has Python been used up to now?
- What other languages are in common use at Ascend?
- What are some of the challenges/difficulties that motivated you to establish this policy?
- What are some of the tradeoffs that you have seen in the adoption of Python in place of your other adopted languages?
- How are you managing ongoing maintenance of projects/products that are not written in Python?
- What are some of the potential pitfalls/risks that you are guarding against in your investment in Python?
- What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Python used where it was previously a different technology?
- What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on aligning all of your development on a single language?
- When is Python the wrong choice?
- What do you have planned for the future of engineering practices at Ascend?
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