Hi, everybody.
Welcome to PyPodcats: The Hidden Figure of Python Podcast
series, which is done by the PyPodcats team.
And the goal of this podcast series
is to highlight the voices from underrepresented
group members of the Python community.
And you can find us on the website.
Our website is pypodcats.live, and our episodes
are listed on the PSF YouTube channel.
And also you can hear it
from Apple Podcast and Spotify.
And we do have a Code of Conduct within our
community, and we follow the PSF's Code of Conduct.
Yeah, I guess.
Let's start introducing ourselves.
My name is Mariatta.
I'm one of the hosts for PyPodcats.
I'm based in Vancouver, Canada, and
I'll give it to you, Tereza.
My name is Tereza.
Thank you, Mariatta.
I am also one of the PyPodcats
hosts, and I'm based in Hamburg, Germany.
And Joanna.
All right, I'm Joanna Jablonski, and I've been
involved in the Python community since, I think,
2016, and I'm also based in Vancouver, Canada.
Joanna, so we know you've been
very active in the Python world.
So would you like to tell us a little bit, like,
how did you get into it, and maybe also, why Python?
Yeah, sure.
I actually had some friends over for dinner.
I think one of them was a data analyst at the
time, and I had been starting to play around with programming
again, and he just happened to be really into Python just
the way that some people are very very into it.
He wanted me to try it out, and then I did.
I think I took, like, a couple courses.
I still felt very new, but I went
to a PyLadies event in Vancouver.
The vibe was completely different from any
other programming meetup I'd ever been to.
I did not feel like I was
being tested or anything like that.
And I, even though I felt very new, people were
just saying, like, yeah, just make a five minute
talk about whatever you're learning and come back.
I'm like, what is this strange place I have landed in?
But it was really nice, and I feel like I
got involved with it because it was there, because Python
has a community in a way that you can't really
necessarily say to the same extent about other languages.
And, yeah, that's kind of the
background for how I got involved.
And then since then, got a ton of
stuff, because I met someone through PyLadies
He knew someone who knew somebody, and that played a
part in how I started working at Real Python.
So I was there for three and a half years.
I ran the curriculum, and
actually, for the application process.
I wrote an article about F-strings,
and I had happened to see Mariatta.
You gave a talk on F-strings at PyLadies,
and I saw that same talk again at PyCascades.
And so it was a lovely sort of circular thing.
And I've spent most of my time in the
Python community on some kind of education angles.
I wanted to ask, basically, how do you feel? Like.
So you said this, you were in the Python
community, and it sounds a little bit like opportunities
came because you were in the Python community, and
more opportunities to be in the Python community.
But then my question is, did you have
career related opportunities coming up from your.
What impact did your work in the Python community
have to say work life, if it had any?
Well, I feel companies sometimes care if you're involved in
open source, so that can be a tick for them.
Being involved in the Python community was part
of how I got involved with Real Python,
but I wouldn't say it's necessary.
I mean, being involved in Python education definitely helped me
work in education at Anaconda, but it has also kind
of felt like two separate tracks for me.
And while I've had my career going, I'm
also kind of keeping this Python world spinning
on the side, at least since I left
Real Python, because then the two were together.
Yeah.
And I'm also more like about if there are
skills that you kind of honed in the community
and then brought back into your work life.
Well, I feel like I see other people who
are really front and center in the community.
For example, you two, Georgi, those types of people.
And I always feel like I have been hidden, in
a sense, where maybe people have seen the name or
the photo, or whenever I end up in some kind
of tech space, as soon as they hear the world
Real Python, they're like the whole, everything stops.
But I feel like a lot of people don't necessarily.
I don't personally have a lot
of visibility in the same way. I mean, I used to.
I think people used to recognize me at conferences.
That would happen, and that was fun.
I think.
We didn't get to hear about what you
did at Real Python, maybe because of the.
Would you like to tell us more about your work in
Real Python for those who are not familiar with that yet?
Yes.
So the title is tricky: Executive Editor.
No one knows what that means.
That sounds big.
Yeah.
It either sounds very big or very small.
Sometimes people see the word editor and they're
like, oh, this is the lady that does
the spell check on my tutorial.
And I'm like, no, I run the curriculum.
So that was interesting.
I came in really early.
That was exciting to me.
I was technically the first employee.
And I find that in general, for educational
content having to do with programming, the bar
is incredibly low, both in terms of sometimes
even just like, is it factually correct?
Are you teaching the right thing to
the right person at the right time?
Are you presenting the information in
a way that is helpful?
And so I like that I got to come in
as someone who didn't have a pure programming background.
It's like, no, we can do better.
And so creating systems and style guides and didactic reviews,
a lot of process to make sure that the stuff
is good in ways that aren't necessarily, I think, prioritized
in some other technical content creation spaces.
And there's a lot of reasons why it's not that really
make sense, but I like that I could come in and
just say like, no, we're going to do this, and some
of you will want to learn how to do this, and
I will invest more in you and that'll be awesome.
Those people, then they could become full time.
And it's a lovely little place where
people get to just teach and write.
It's really cool.
It's an interesting sort of world in itself.
And there's the community around it, and
there'll be Open Spaces at PyCon.
And we had our subscriber community and Slack and office
hours, and it really grew while I was there.
When I joined, we were putting out,
I think, one technical tutorial a week.
And by the time I left, we were putting
out two fairly lengthy, often tutorials a week, which
people in the community started calling book-icles.
Anthony Shaw's article on CPython's interpreter, I
think was something like 24,000 words.
It's bananas.
And it's not fluff, right?
Like it's really juicy stuff.
Because through the review process, we're making sure
that it's not just fluff for no reason.
And the writing is tight and you're saying the right
thing to the right person at the right time.
By the time I left, we were putting out
two hefty, really good written tutorials a week, a
video course, a newsletter, office hours, and a podcast.
So in those three and a half years, it just exploded.
And book projects.
So I co-authored Python Basics with David Amos, and
I was also the primary viewer, helping Anthony Shaw write
his book on CPython internals, which sort of started as
an article, and then we turned it into a proper,
like a "book" book, and that it was the missing manual.
That was a very cool thing to work on,
especially since in my background, I've kind of flip
flopped between STEM stuff and natural language stuff.
And I like finding the overlap between the two.
And I find that in tech there is a
special niche for people who really want to be
on that weird overlap, which I can get to
later, but I found overlaps with stuff like interpreters,
where this is a language and you're not just
using the language, you're designing and building a language.
That's cool.
I also dabbled with NLP, and one sort of fun achievement
on that end is that if you Google NLP Python, the
first result is a tutorial by me, which know is very fun
Yeah, I used NLTK for it.
This is like a bit
The landscape has changed, but it was pretty cool.
And also another very satisfying overlap between programming languages
and natural languages is the education side, which is
why I've found a place here like sort of
docs and education, and there's sort of different companies
will call it different things, but it's that overlap
between code words and people, and managing to simultaneously
have technical depth but have the other skills that
make it usable and useful both for yourself and others.
And that's interesting. Yeah.
So, actually I wanted to ask you, when you
were saying, you mentioned that you didn't just study
STEM and you come from a different background.
So I think both Mariatta and I are coming from
a computer science background, and we've seen a lot of
people in tech coming just from computer science.
And I personally always like teams that are not
just computer scientists in data science, at least.
So can you tell us a little bit about, or tell
the audience a little bit about your life before Python?
So my education was fairly focused on STEM for a while.
So even though I'm in Canada, I
went through the French school system, so
they have you specialize fairly early.
And I went through the science stream, where
it's just all science all the time.
You're not even taking French classes by the end.
You're just super zeroed in, focused on
math, chemistry, physics, biology, geology, et cetera.
And that ended up being kind of, I don't
want to say unbalanced, but like, literally technically unbalanced,
because it was very far in one direction.
And then I ended up sort of correcting into getting
a degree in translation, which is incredibly puzzle based.
So it was giving me a similar experience, but in a
different space that was like a bit of a palate cleanser.
And so I feel like I've zigzagged a
bit where I was hardcore on STEM.
Then I went into translation and got a degree.
It's technically an Arts degree.
Then I was programming for fun, and then I sort
of, like the slalom, reduced into finding a middle spot
between the two, which happened to be useful for tech
because there are a lot of specialists and there need
to be people who can kind of bridge gaps, I
find, between the different specializations.
I think we definitely need lots of different skills.
Everybody contribute in their own way.
Having all these different skills makes us all better.
And I think I just want to add, like, I really
admire what you did or what you did for Real Python.
I know that even now, sometimes in a lot of communities,
sometimes even in the PyLadies Slack, somebody would be asking questions
like, how do I do X, how do I do Y?
And then a lot of time I see the
answer is that, oh, here's the Real Python article
about it that's being referred to a lot.
So I think it's really impressive.
Thank you for your work on that.
It's really fun to hear. Yeah.
And just the fact that it was.
I mean, it has to support itself and it does.
The fact that a lot of that stuff is
free, that has to be helping people as well.
I similarly was self taught, and so, yeah, I paid
for some courses, but a lot of it was just
like, well, things are on the Internet, I'll go learn.
And so it felt like a neat sort of
circular, like, oh, I learned from the Internet.
I'm now providing to the Internet, and
other people will learn as well.
Yeah.
Maybe you would like to tell us more about what else
you do in the Python community other than Real Python.
I worked in education, Anaconda for a while.
I think I mentioned the two book projects already.
One very cool thing that I did
was cover the Language Summit for 2021.
It felt like an honor, and it also felt like,
kind of like a lovely mesh of those two sides.
I found where I could make it like a
proper journalism tutorially really polished article, but also have
it reflect something that's actually useful and correct.
And that was very cool.
But also, it was an honor to be a fly on the wall.
Not many people go to that, and I got to basically be
a door for the whole rest of the community onto that.
And I took it very seriously, and I really wanted to
make sure the articles were good, and I got lots of
good feedback and, yeah, I really enjoyed doing that.
Yeah.
For those who don't know the Python Language Summit is
an event at PyCon US that is usually attended only
by 50 or so people, by mostly Python core developers.
And so basically, the people who have a lot of influence,
I would say, to how the Python language is like, and
because of this meeting, is not open to public.
Having an article, having blog post is how
the rest of the Python community can learn
of what was discussed in the community.
So it's really important.
It's the only way we get to share what
happened at the Language Summit without all the core
developers having to write their own notes.
So it's really important.
So thank you for your help on that.
And there was another cool thing that happened at
the Language Summit, was the previous year, I had
read the articles, and I'd seen that there was
talk of creating the Editorial Board for Python's docs.
And then in the year that I covered it, I think.
Mariatta, did you and Carol present, both
of you together on the topic?
I think the three of us.
I don't remember. Me, Carol and Ned Batchelder, we all
three of us wanted to have this.
And so I had read about it before, but finally
I was in the room where people were actually talking
about it, and so I basically grabbed Carol, was like,
I have to be on this, please.
It sounded very much right up my alley, especially since
the goals of the Editorial Board were sort of more.
Where it was less about, well, like, we'll fix
some typos, we'll see about this or this.
It was more like, how do
we make this better for learners?
Because people who are using Python now are
completely different from people who were using Python,
like, ages ago, since now it's people's first
language, just basically as a matter of course,
as part of their standard education.
And so I started working with
Carol on that fairly slowly then.
And then just recently, we published the
PEP, and now we're really getting rolling.
So I'd say the main thing I'm
doing in the Python Community now is
going to be Editorial Board stuff, actually.
Can you explain a little bit more about the PEP?
PEP 732, if I got the number right?
Yeah.
And that is an Editorial Board for those of us.
I think most of us don't actually know it yet.
Yeah, that's fair.
I'll let me explain.
Fair enough.
PEP 732. It's super short.
If anyone wants to go check
it out, just search PEP 732.
So PEP 732 outlines the basic purpose of the
Editorial board, what it is, what it isn't, and
how it relates to other parts of the Python
world, because there are other people working on docs.
And the difference between the Editorial Board and other
people working on docs is that the Editorial Board
is going to deal with more big picture stuff,
strategy and creating systems for people who are going
to be contributing, basically to make it easier to
contribute and to make it easier to learn
Python.
I have a question. So I hear a lot of
Since 2016, it sounds like you've been
doing quite a lot compared to
It sounds like this would be for
other people, like a full time job
But I'm just kind of like, ask, how
much time do you volunteer for Python?
I don't actually know.
Yeah, it varied a lot.
I mean, for a while, it was like my
full time job for a good chunk there.
I mean, I count Real Python.
Real Python wasn't volunteering, but it very squarely put me
in the center of things in terms of Python.
Otherwise, it's dipped and gone up.
I think one of the reasons it's
possible long term is because it's slow.
I have previously described open source
as like middle school, but slower.
And so I feel like there is very
little pressure to get things done quickly.
At least my experience has been things aren't urgent.
That has positives and negatives, because it
might take forever to get your PR
reviewed and might demoralize people from contributing.
But it also means that people seem to be
fairly conscious of the fact that we're all doing
this for free in our limited spare time.
So let's give each other a break.
And sometimes it feels like every next
word out of people's mouths is burnout.
So simultaneously, it's a problem, but people
are recognizing that it's a problem.
So, bit of a meandering answer, but I think
the fact that it's slow helps, and the fact
that there is a general attempt to treat each
other like people in a very concerted way.
I find in the Python community, that really takes
the edge off some of the more trying bits.
If you're tired or if you're frustrated, if everyone
sort of keeps their manners, then we might all
continue working together, I think much more easily than
if someone just sort of swans off and makes
things more unpleasant than people necessarily want it to
be for what is essentially a hobby.
Have you managed to avoid
getting a burnout from volunteering?
No, I don't think anyone on
this podcast will answer yes to that.
So here's the thing.
I know that right now in the market is hard,
and right now I feel like everyone's having a hard
time, and a lot of them, when I talk to
people, I can see the drain on their face.
I can see the emotion on their face.
They're really struggling.
And I feel like most of the people I
talk to right now are having a hard time.
It feels like a very common experience.
I just want to say, like, even in the last month,
I hear so many of my friends in the Python community.
I don't know if I should say it, but they are burnout.
Like, they're looking for different opportunities.
The tech industry seems like changing.
2023 seems to be, like, a strange year.
I don't know when we last had a normal year.
I know, but it's just, like, escalating.
It's like you always think, okay, this
was strange, and then the next year
is going even more strange, and then.
You're like, what on earth will next
year be like at this point?
I don't know, but, no, I want to add to it,
which is that, yeah, I feel like that's sort of an
elephant in the room that we might talk about or we
might not talk about, depending on who we're talking with.
But other friends of mine have also
just said, like, you know what?
I'm done with tech.
And they are fabulous, super accomplished.
I can't believe. They're amazing.
And then they just like, no, I'm
just going to go do this now.
That is something that I'm seeing
happen a lot, especially lately.
I also remember.
I have a very vague memory of some tweet ages
ago, maybe some woman celebrating that she made it to
Was it ten years in tech?
Because now she beat the
average or something like that.
I don't remember the precise numbers,
but the sentiment was, like, I
have achieved being slightly above average.
Congrats to me.
Something to celebrate. Yeah.
Do you have any?
Maybe, like, I don't know, things in life to
balance things out that help you balance things out?
Like other non tech related things?
Yes, definitely.
I have gone in the extreme opposite direction
in a lot of my other interests.
I am very very interested in neolithic and Bronze Age
textiles, and so I do a lot of research.
Sometimes I make pieces based on archaeological finds.
If I'm not here, I'm, like, doing something
with sticks out far, far away from here.
But I've started making yarn with a drop spindle,
and I am really into just identifying moss and
things that are the complete polar opposite of this.
You've asked me a topic.
I have to say one more thing
on this, but neanderthal eating habits.
Actually, I think there is either a YouTube
channel or some blog post about neanderthal cuisine.
I heard.
I don't know, my partner was talking about that.
Cool.
Or Roman, I don't know, something.
There's all kinds of stuff, but if someone
wants something to Google, a really fun term
is experimental archaeology, because there are people.
Selly Pointer is a great one,
since we're talking about YouTube.
But basically you learn about artifacts by trying
to recreate them and by recreating them.
You see, like, okay, so the loom
must have been created this way.
And incidentally, one last more tangent.
I have this one local group that I
do a lot of ancient textile stuff with,
and there's one technique that was called spraying.
It was popular in the Neolithic.
If you're asking someone on a programming podcast
about their niche interest, something's going to happen.
No, it is combined.
Okay, I will tell you one last thing,
because this does circle back to programming, but
we're learning how to do spraying together, which
is a neolithic textile technique that predates weaving.
She was creating little notes for herself for how she
was, so that she could recreate it and learn it.
And the notes were essentially binary
because it was like, I moved.
She didn't intend to be binary, but it
was binary, which also ties in with how
the history of programming ties in with looms.
Anyway, it sounds like reverse engineering, like you
saw something and you tried to build.
And a lot of it's geometry and, like,
3d shapes in materials and chemistry, especially a
lot of dyes, and things get really finicky.
Anyway, there we go.
There's my niche interest for the podcast.
I think we all need that, and I
think everybody needs niche interests to stay sane.
And, yeah, I'm also into
art restoration, so that's fun. And knitting.
I mean, that's the other.
Yeah, that's awesome.
And I bet Mariatta also has some secret stuff going on.
I'm into food, so when you say, like,
learning about neanderthal eating habit, that's something I'm interested.
Sometimes I like even figuring out how
did people come up with this dish?
I like to learn about the history.
I even learned a history of ketchup.
The word ketchup is a native
word in my native language.
Like in Malay, Indonesian language, we have the word "kecap",
but it refers to a different type of sauce.
The sauce is usually dark sauce things.
You say soy sauce, that's ketchup. "Kecap".
Salty sauce is like "kecap asin", "kecap manis"
So "sauce" to me is "ketchup".
But what American thinks of the word
"ketchup" in my language is tomato sauce.
It's reversed.
We don't say ketchup with tomato.
Tomato sauce.
With sugar.
With a lot of sugar.
Ketchup.
But I tried to dig it up.
Why did we have this same word?
It turns out when the Heinz or whoever tries
to come up with the name of their sauce,
they borrow it from Malaysian, from Indonesian.
Like, they take this word from us.
Anyway, it's totally random archaeology.
No, that's really cool.
It's all of the mysteries that you can find in words.
Coming back to words and your... tada! and
your multifaceted interest in computer science and languages.
I was wondering, how has this kind
of come up in your work?
Like this intersection between computer
science and translation and language?
Yes, I guess I found out that it's really useful.
Generally, I find a big pressure to just be an
engineer and everyone has to go be an engineer.
And I feel like people are confused why
I don't just go be a pure engineer.
But I've also found that the opportunities for people who
can do multiple things, like if you can code and
you can talk to people and you can write and
you can teach and you can organize and you can
learn whatever else new thing is required of you, then
opportunities might come to you fairly quickly and well enough
that by the time someone's trying to hire you for
an engineer role, you might actually be making more than
a junior engineer.
It just comes sometimes.
So there is definitely a need.
The jobs can be weirder and less common.
So when I look at job postings, I'm not
just looking like look up like Django developer or
like data analyst or something very structured.
I'm looking at all kinds of things, and I have often been
like the first X at a company or been given a job.
Like, we don't know what this job is.
Go figure it out.
Which I personally find fun, since you get
to make your own job and kind of
create some direction and agency for yourself.
But yeah, there are fewer jobs like that than just, I
am an engineer, but the people who are looking for you
are also having a harder time finding people like you.
So it depends what path you like.
But I like this middle path.
There's a lot of variety and it feels more social.
It feels like I can still move in
a lot of different directions from here.
I don't feel boxed in.
Like I could still become a specialist as
long as I still keep every door open.
It means that know constantly learning a lot of things and
I don't know what my next job will be like.
And so sometimes I'm like, I don't know, should I
take courses on instructional design, or should I get my
next AWS certification, or should I do this?
Or should I do this?
Or should like, I feel like that mentality might also
be not uncommon among people who are active in open
source who just tend to fill like, there may be
a type who tends to fill their schedule, who I
think might be drawn to open source as well.
So that might be a recurring theme in these chats.
And maybe, I think one of the things that
is also, if you're open like that to different
learning ways and different ways of interacting with people,
it's also opening up the space where you're not
needing to be an expert in everything.
You can collaborate with other people and leverage
that other people are good at something and
you have indicating to figure that out, right?
Totally.
And then it helps you bring people together,
it helps you accomplish bigger things, and it
helps you train people to replace you.
These are all good things.
These are all signs of growth, both individually
and within a community and within a company.
So that's the opposite.
Like things that you can do to stave off stagnation.
I think.
I think it's actually a good thing being able to
adapt and being flexible, being able to work with a
lot of different types of people, because it's not actually
easy, it's hard working with people worldwide.
It takes a certain skill and intentionality
to being able to work together.
So what is next for you?
I think you mentioned to me you
have a secret project or something about.
It ties in, because we just had PyLadiesCon con recently, and it
ties in with my talk at PyLadiesCon, which was based on
a really short skimmable article that I wrote called How To
Make a Docs Site: Shortcuts for Busy Devs
And that article was aimed at developers who
are not particularly interested in making docs, but
for whatever reason they need one.
Maybe they have an open source project that they
want to share, or they are at a startup
that now needs to create its first doc site
and they just need to get something out.
So in that article, I gave them a super short,
opinionated, practical guide to have a path of least resistance
towards just getting a doc site out that is decent.
And I'm also working on sort of successor to
that that is longer and more involved and is
still very practical, but is just a richer resource
like gives templates and checklists and systematizes the process
of making docs to make it less painless for
people who are not particularly interested in docs.
Because if you are interested in docs,
there are resources out there for you.
There's the book: Docs for Developers.
The Product is Docs. Docs Like Code.
But I feel like those books are for docs people who
want to sit down and read a book about docs.
They're excellent. I own them.
I don't have them here.
I had them here on the PyLadies talk so
that if someone recommended books or asked for recommendations,
I could put like, these two are great.
Or three, because I have anyway.
But I find that those have more theory in
them than some audiences might have patience for.
So I wanted to create sort of
a very systematized golden path of least
resistance towards making that. It's not public.
I wasn't even sure how much detail I was going to
go into, but apparently it all just fell out of me.
No problem.
That is something I'm working on.
I don't know.
I've been at companies, at startups, a few different
startups where they have no docs at all.
At all.
And because there is no docs, when it's time
to off board somebody, like when somebody leave there
is this two weeks of grueling handover.
Tell us everything you know from
two years into these two weeks.
I think documentation should just be done continuously.
It should become part of the work you do.
As you write code, you write test, you write doc.
It's part of the package in my opinion.
Yeah, it's more sustainable.
It is worth it.
Are you looking for testers for your new project?
I will be.
I don't have anything to give them to test that.
I need to be ready to share this with people.
Maybe there's like a place where people
can reach you and put your waitlist.
Yes, no, I would love that.
That's an excellent idea.
My handle on GitHub is jablonskidev
J-A-B-L-O-N-S-K-I-D-E-V
My personal site is jojab.dev
J-O-J-A-B dot dev
If you want to find me
on LinkedIn, just search Joanna Jablonski.
I'm very findable and yeah, I'm always happy
to talk about developer education and docs.
So hit me up.
I would love to chat.
Awesome.
Well, thank you, Joanna, for speaking
with us and sharing your experience.
And thank you for having me.
And thank you for making this podcast.
Thank you for it