Guido van Rossum By the PyBay
Alexy Khrabrov interviews Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, at the 10th PyBay conference in San Francisco.
If you like Python, AI and OSS community, you should join AI By the Bay, the longest running independent AI conference in Bay Area, coming back to Oakland for the 13th year on November 17-19. Reserve your seat: ai.bythebay.io.
On September 18, I had the honor of representing Neo4j as a sponsor of the 10th Anniversary PyBay conference. The creator of Python himself, Guido van Rossum gave a talk, Structured RAG is Better than RAG! When I entered the conference space at the UCSF Mission Bay, I saw a group of developers surrounding Guido, it was him, obviously. As a sponsor we agreed to record a few interviews for our blog, Fika AI. Fika means coffee time — Neo4j is originally from Sweden -- and is supposed to bring a diverse group of people in AI and software engineering. And who but Guido is one of the most fitting guests, now that Python is the language of AI!
The fun thing was, fans always surrounded Guido. That’s expected at a Python community conference! Finally, after lunch was served outside, we were able to record a conversation under the pine trees.
We went over a wide range of topics, including Python efficiency and success, type system add-ons such as Pydantic, functional programming with lambda/map/reduce and whether Guido actually regretted adding them, does he vibe code, and more.
https://youtu.be/Yci6YomLgFY?si=ijumRfvht0BoVV6b
A note on photography: I was the only one from Neo4j there, so I had to operate my rig single-handedly. As an avid Leica photographer with decades of conference photos from all of my events online, I prefer to carry only a couple Leicas with me, so I am using a Q3 43 for both photo and video here. Although capable of 8K video, the Q3 is not a video camera — it does not do autofocus well, for instance. It has an amazing and groundbreaking lens, the Summicron APO 43/2.0, that makes beautiful bokeh. The problem is that wide open, the depth of field is razor thin. Normally, I manually prefocus on the guest standing at a fixed distance and join them. I’ve done the same with Guido, but he wanted to sit down and then started rocking gently, so you’ll see a gentle blur on some of the footage. Consider it artistic softening and enjoy the wise words!