Petr Baudis
Petr Baudis is a co-founder and CTO of Rossum, a SaaS deep tech scaleup that focuses on automating document-based B2B transactional communication. He co-invented Rossum's unique AI engine and currently oversees Rossum's R&D and product engineering. In the past, Petr led multiple AI research and deep learning projects in academia as well as in commercial environments. His work was used by companies like Google DeepMind, Novartis, Seznam.cz and countless others. Petr's past exploits include building one of the key predecessors of AlphaGo, working with Linus Torvalds as one of the founding developers of Git, and leading many other open-source projects.
Session
We have spent eight years building an enterprise cloud-based AI software product, Rossum (name unrelated to Guido, we promise). Rossum now automates handling business transactions worth trillions of dollars - fully in Python (on the backend). Let's recount some war stories: What surprised us, what did we regret, and what were some important right choices we made?
The biggest war story is about the three major components of Rossum, and three major Python ecosystems - plain old-school Python, Django, and the emerging Pydantic / FastAPI school. Which one to choose? Why ever choose more than one? But what happens then - how much are you locked in?
We will wrap up with an appeal to Python maintainers - is the Zen of Python still true? "There should be one - and preferably only one - obvious way to do it?" Let's consider along which lines the Python ecosystem is fracturing, and how to possibly mend it.