This week we welcome Florian Bruhin as our PyDev of the Week. Let’s spend some time getting to know our fellow Pythonista!
Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc):
My name is Florian Bruhin, I’m currently 22.9 years old, and living in Switzerland.
I’m working as an electronical engineer (though, ironically, spending most time writing Python running on PCs), and plan to start studying computer science next year.
My primary hobby is a python project which got a bit bigger than I thought it would 😉
Other than that I enjoy swimming and spending quite some time in trains. I’m not sure if this is a hobby or a necessity though 😉
Why did you start using Python?
Back in 2011 I had the idea of modifying an electronic typewriter to output tweets and other oneliners related to the demoscene. I knew (embedded) C, QBasic and bash at the time, and already abused bash for a lot of things where it definitely wasn’t the best tool (like writing IRC bots).
I realized I really don’t want to scrape websites in any of those languages, so I had to learn a better language. I couldn’t decide between Ruby and Python, so I ended up learning the basics of both for a few weeks each.
Even though Ruby has this awesome comic tutorial with cute foxes, I decided to go with Python at the end.
What other programming languages do you know and which is your favorite?
I know a lot of C and Bash, some C++ and Ruby, and probably still some Basic even though I haven’t used it in years (I’m fine with that!).
Python and C are my favourites, for highlevel and embedded stuff respectively.
I’m currently learning Javascript (because I need it, not because I like to), and I’d like to explore Haskell, Rust and Go, but haven’t had the time to do that so far.
What projects are you working on now?
qutebrowser is my main project since almost 2 years now. I started it because I couldn’t find a good vim-like browser, and I’m probably not stopping anytime soon.
I’m also contributing to pytest and its plugins from time to time.
I’d like to contribute more to pylint as well, but I’m mostly contributing issues rather than code because my time, unfortunately, is finite.
Which Python libraries are your favorite (core or 3rd party)?
I really like the projects mentioned above. I can only recommend any project to use pytest and pylint. I think I can add some more testing related tools to that, like tox, coverage.py and hypothesis.
I have a love-hate relationship with Qt and PyQt. I’d love if there was a more pythonic API on top of the Qt bindings, and the development process of PyQt isn’t very open unfortunately.
I enjoy the APIs and code of projects like requests and flask, even though I don’t use them often myself.
Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Write more tests before it’s too late! 😉
Thanks!