Recently, the Rabbit Hole developers' podcast interviewed me; we discussed open source sustainability, maintainership, sensationalism among bards who sang the Odyssey, how PyPI is like Wikipedia, and what we think is paranoid.

The interview continued into a second episode discussing PyCon and The Art of Python, my past talks and plays, Halt and Catch Fire, what conferences are for, and the feeling of giving a bad talk.

Thanks to Stride for providing rough transcripts along with the audio!

A listener punned on my username ("brainwane") to tell me, "loved your perspective and insight on the podcast ... for me, it was 'braingain'". Awww!

We recorded these episodes on 27 February. The 7:17-08:06 segment of the first one proved prescient:

David:... NPM does an audit of the packages and says, okay, like, "this version is flagged with a known vulnerability, you should upgrade this." And it will just hammer you with that [unintelligible], infinitely, until you handle it. But like, you know, that’s also a form of open source software, that we’re depending on to nudge us.

Sumana: Right, and then the question of, again, sustainability, of like, well, is NPM, as a venture-backed thing, right..... You stay in this industry long enough and VC sounds like a dangerous term for anything you’re actually going to depend on.

David: Yeah, like the idea of something like PyPI going away. Like, I don't know what I would do? I would just have to find all of the binaries on a website? And like host my own... thing? Or...?

Stride released this episode on 19 March. On 22 March, surprising staff and at least this observer, npm laid off a number of workers on its open source team.

Please note that you can make a one-time or recurring donation of any amount to the Python Software Foundation that specifically supports PyPI and related packaging and distribution work (disclaimer: the PSF currently pays Changeset Consulting to work on PyPI and packaging), and that your org can sponsor the PSF for as little as USD$500 per year. And I am, as always, speaking here entirely for myself and not for any of my clients or colleagues.