Brett Cannon
Brett Cannon has been a core developer since 2003, letting him touch much of Python's code base in some way. Thanks to that amount of time and a penchant for writing too much, it has allowed him to become the 5th most prolific PEP (co-)author. He served on the Python steering council for 5 consecutive years, starting with the inaugural council. Probably the biggest things Brett is known for are importlib, trying to make the 2->3 transition easier, pyproject.toml, and his blog at https://snarky.ca . Basically Brett has been around long enough you can thank/blame him for a bunch of stuff.
A big proponent of the Python community, Brett's known for his quote, "I came for the language, but I stayed for the community", which still holds true for him today. He served on the PSF board a number of times and received the Frank Willison Award in 2016.
Brett lives in Vancouver, Canada with his wife and child (who just became a toddler, hence the current lack of hobbies).
Sessions
Work started on a lock file specification for Python in earnest on 2021-01-31 and culminated in PEP 751 being accepted on 2025-03-31! While it's great that a conclusion was reached, why did it take 4 years to go from idea to acceptance? Because Python packaging is, in a word, hard.
The flexibility that Python packaging provides has led to over 600,000 projects on PyPI and Python becoming the glue language of the internet, but at the cost of some complexity and not having "one tool to rule them all". This talk will cover why Python packaging is hard and how that played into creating a lock file specification. The history of the spec and what it provides will also be covered.
Python has been evolving very rapidly in the last few years, and this is because new ideas have been taking over the Core Development. New ideas require new people, a new background and lots of energy.
This panel aims for the people to be aware of the changes that are coming in 3.14, and future versions, as well as ways people can contribute by testing features, fixing issues, or even sharing their own ideas.
- Hosts: Łukasz & Pablo
- Panelists:
- Hugo van Kemenade
- Emily Morehouse-Valcarcel
- Brett Cannon
- Mark Shannon
- Savannah Bailey
Join us for a keynote Q&A panel featuring some of the foundational names in Python, as they discuss how the language went from a side project in Amsterdam to powering AI at the world’s biggest companies.
Alongside the panel, we’ll be showing a special 20 minute excerpt from the long anticipated “Python: The Documentary”. Featuring Guido van Rossum, Travis Oliphant, Barry Warsaw, and many more, this upcoming full-length documentary traces Python’s slow-but-steady rise, its community-driven evolution, and the language’s impact on... well… everything. This documentary excerpt has been specifically created for EuroPython by CultRepo.
See the trailer of the documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqBqdNIPrbo