This week we welcome Rémy Hubscher as our PyDev of the Week! Rémy works for Mozilla and is a very active contributor to open source projects. Just check out his Github profile! Let’s spend some time getting to know him better.
Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc):
I am a French OpenSource programmer, living in Britanny in Rennes.
I graduated from a French Instistute of Technology (IUT) in Computer Software then did a Bachelor in Computer Science at the University of Portsmouth in UK where I wrote PyTalk, my final year project and a Proof of Concept Python Jabber Client in Qt with video integration.
After my batchelor I graduate from the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbeliard in Computer Science and Embedded Systems and I started a company about Web Application for companies (mostly using Python/Django).
I am playing the saxophone and a little bit of guitar. I like salling cruise and motorbike across countries.
Why did you start using Python?
I heard a lot about Python but learning a language named as a snake is quite scary.
From the very beginning I was really interested in the web, I started my first website using Netscape Composer on a Macintosh LC II before even having internet at home and using the Netscape Help as documentation.
Then at the IUT I was asked to build a website for the City Student Association. I was planning to start using what I knew at the time PHP/MySQL and a bit of home made tools but Damien Boucard came and told me he will help me to build it using Python and Django, the framework of the future.
We spend 3 months in the summer trying to build this website with the first public version of Django (0.91) but when we eventually happens to have something working, the hosting was too high and it was never used in production.
For me it was the start and from that point I never build a website with PHP again, my last big project using Django is the Postbox application for the Luxembourg Post.
What other programming languages do you know and which is your favorite?
During my study I learn C/C++/Java a bit of LISP/PROLOG. For the web you need to know a bit of HTML/CSS/SQL/Javascript but I really learned Javascript at Mozilla when building the Firefox Hello service in Node.
Today I will say that I know Python and Javascript. Programming languages are not really the question, the question is how fast you can adapt to a new paradigm and get the job done the best way possible.
I’d like to build a service in Go and then in Rust but today I am trying to figure out how to test Python 3 asyncio services.
What projects are you working on now?
I have a bunch of OpenSource project I worked on that I like to keep maintaining and actively work on with the community.
My plan is to release as OpenSource every pieces of code that I need to use in more than one project.
Today I am working for Mozilla on Mozilla services, we built Firefox Hello service last year and this year we are building a storage service in order to let apps store UserData in a way to protect their privacy and that scales.
Which Python libraries are your favorite (core or 3rd party)?
It is hard to say, it depends of the context. Today I am really thinking asyncio can be a great tool for the next generation of services but there is still work to do and I’d like to be part of the movement.
I am also a big fan of ZMQ.
Is there anything else you’d like to say?
The tools I like to work with: Redis / PostgreSQL / Emacs.
Today I am really happy to work with my team and with the people of Mozilla as well as the one of the Python Community.
I am also glad to be part of the Django Carrots movement as a mentor on time to time to help people girls and boys to learn how to code we need good coders.