Sad Python Girls Club

🎙️ Welcome to the final episode of the Sad Python Girls Club Podcast for 2024! ✨

In this special episode, we had the pleasure of speaking with Denny Perez, a Software QA Analyst and PSF Board Member. Denny shares her remarkable journey from the world of accounting to the realm of IT, and eventually into the Python community. Her story is one of transformation and inspiration, as she has become a trusted mentor for many aspiring contributors to a more diverse and inclusive Python ecosystem.

We also discussed our favorite Python-related news from the past year, reflecting on the highlights and milestones that have shaped the community in 2024 -- make sure to tune in! 🎧

Links and Resources:

• Denny Perez @ GitHub: https://github.com/DennyPerez18
• The Python Software Foundation (PSF): https://www.python.org/psf-landing/
• Results from 2024 PSF elections: https://discuss.python.org/t/psf-board-election-proposed-bylaws-changes-results-announcement/58465
• PyCon US: https://us.pycon.org/2025/
• PyCon Charlas: https://us.pycon.org/2025/speaking/charlas/
• PyCon Charlas contact e-mail: [email protected]
• Pyladies Con 2024: https://conference.pyladies.com/
• Octoverse: Python is the top language in GitHub: https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-2024/
• The Python Sofware Foundation receives the Wonderfully Welcoming Award from GitHub: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2023/11/psf-wonderfully-welcoming-award-github.html
• Savannah Ostrowski is officially a Python Core Developer: https://discuss.python.org/t/vote-to-promote-savannah-ostrowski/70302
• Someone like you by Adele: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLQl3WQQoQ0
• Corazón Multicolor by Luis Fonsi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5c6T5kyR86g
• Another sad love song by Toni Braxton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yQ0Fll_9pM

Intro Song: Pastel

Producer: Blue.P

Music provided by LogSquare

If we ask you what the similarities between Ruby and Python are, it's likely that the answer will be they're both dynamically typed interpreted languages. But did you know there's a lot more than just that? 👀 In the 5th episode of season 2 of the Sad Python Girls Club podcast, Vinicius Stock, Staff Developer at Shopify, joins us to explore the similarities between Ruby and Python, extending beyond technical aspects to their vibrant communities ✨

Tune in to learn more about how Ruby support in VS Code works, and how it relates to our team’s efforts to support diverse scenarios for Python 🐍💎

Links and Resources:

• Vinicius Stock @ GitHub
• VS Code Ruby extension
• VS Code Ruby LSP extension
• Ruby Sorbet (type checker) VS Code extension
• VS Code Ruby documentation
• Ruby LSP repo
• VS Code Ruby design and roadmap doc
• VS Code Python's new setting, "python.locator" which can be set to "native" or "js"
• Estranged by Guns N' Roses

Intro Song: Pastel

Producer: Blue.P

Music provided by LogSquare

We are over the moon 🌜 to announce a new episode of the Sad Python Girls Club Podcast! 🎉 This time, our co-hosts Dawn Wages and Luciana Abud are joined by Karthik Nadig, Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft. And, as a special guest, we have Charlie Marsh, Founder of Astral and the mind behind the popular Python tools Ruff and uv. 🐍✨ 

In this exciting episode, we dove into the backstory and motivation behind Charlie's creation of Ruff and how that paved the way for Astral. We explore the inner workings of his team and how they manage their awesome tools, and we get an exclusive sneak peek into their future plans. 🚀

It's a super fun episode featuring tech insights and open source learnings, so make sure you don't miss it!  

Links and Resources

• Charlie Marsh @ GitHub
• SPGC's S1 Episode 3 - Karthik Nadig
• Astral announcement
• Astral.sh
• Ruff: An extremely fast Python linter, written in Rust
• uv: An extremely fast Python package installer and resolver, written in Rust
• Rye: a Hassle-Free Python Experience
• "Rye grows with uv" blog post
• VS Code Ruff extension
• Ruff language server announcement
• GitHub Copilot
• Holocene by Bon Iver

Intro Song: Pastel

Producer: Blue.P

Music provided by LogSquare

This is the 3rd episode of season 2 of the Sad Python Girls Club Podcast, and we couldn't be more excited about it! 🥳 We had an awesome chat with Courtney Webster, Product Manager II at Microsoft working on the Python development support in Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio 🐍. She’s also the esteemed author behind our monthly release blog posts for the Python extension in VS Code 📰. Dive in with us as we learn about Courtney’s contributions to the Python community, her work to streamline the "getting started" experience for Python in VS Code, her efforts in package management support and educational initiatives, as well her approach to experimentation 🧪 and data-driven development 📈.

Links and Resources

• Courtney Webster @ GitHub
• Python extension for VS Code blog posts & release notes
• Python in Visual Studio
• Microsoft's Privacy Statement
• How to disable telemetry in VS Code & extensions
• Microsoft's Experimentation Platform
• VS Code experimentation client
• How to opt in, opt out or disable Python extension experiments
• A look into workflow tools - package management in the Python extension for VS Code, by Courtney Webster @ discuss.python.org
• PEP 722 - Dependency specification for single-file scripts [rejected]
• PEP 723 - Inline Script Metadata [accepted]
• PEP 722 and PEP 723 User Study Discussion by Courtney Webster @ discuss.python.org
• Python extension's Create Environment command
• Quick Start Guide for Python in VS Code
• Microsoft Learn
• Python Trainings @ Microsoft Learn
• PyCon US 2024
• DjancoCon US
• DjangoCon Europe 2024
• EuroPython 2024
• SciPy 2024
• CFP: EuroScipy 2024 (Poland), open until May 26th, 2024
• CFP: PyCon India 2024, open until May 31st, 2024
• CFP: PyCon France 2024, open until July 21st, 2024
• CFP: PyCon APAC 2024 (Indonesia), open until August 1st, 2024
• What a Time by Julia Michaels ft. Niall Horan

Intro Song: Pastel

Producer: Blue.P

Music provided by LogSquare

Welcome to episode 2 of the second season of the Sad Python Girls Club Podcast! This time we had the pleasure to chat with Eleanor Boyd, Software Engineer at Microsoft, about her work on improving testing support for Python in VS Code 🧪🐍

Join us for an episode full of geeky tech talk 🤓 as we peel back the curtain on a major refactoring mission that is enabling the development of new testing features to come (😉😉 Django folks).

Links and resources:

• Eleanor Boyd @ GitHub
• pytest
• Pytest plugins
• unittest
• Python Packaging repository
• Feature request @ vscode-python to support Django unittests (from November 2017)
• Coverage.py
• VS Code's Test Coverage API proposal
• Python testing in VS Code documentation
• Episode 214 of the Python Test podcast, featuring Eleanor Boyd and Courtney Webster talking about their work on rolling out the changes on testing support for Python in VS Code.

Intro Song: Pastel

Producer: Blue.P

Music provided by LogSquare

We're ✨ thrilled ✨ to back with another episode of the Sad Python Girls Club Podcast! "New Year, New Season" is a celebratory episode marking the beginning of Season 2 of our podcast, this time hosted by Luciana Abud and Dawn Wages. In this episode, we look back at some of the amazing things that happened in 2023 in the Python community 🐍 as well in our teams here at Microsoft (featuring a yearly review on the Python updates for VS Code!). So grab your favorite ice cream 🍦, put on your headphones 🎧 and join us for an episode full of highlights and hopes for an even better 2024 🚀

Links & resources:

• S1 Episode 12 of the Sad Python Girls Club podcast with Dawn Wages
• Python 3.12 updates
• PEP 602 - annual release cycle for Python
• The Python Pulse, happening every second Friday of every month, at 11am PST
• VS Code Channel on YouTube
• Meet the Python for VS Code team at the Python Pulse
• Wonderfully Welcoming Award from GitHub to the PSF
• Python People podcast
• Brett Cannon at the Python People podcast
• Mariatta Wijaya at the Python People podcast
• Hidden Figures of Python podcast by the Podcats team
• Test discovery and execution rewrite update in VS Code
• Automatic conversion of f-strings with Pylance
• Code navigation on strings that contain module names with Pylance
• Move symbol refactoring with Pylance
• Show Type Hierarchy with Pylance
• Migrating Python tools to VS Code extensions
• Data Wrangler extension for VS Code
• Aka.ms/Python: the new Python at Microsoft website
• Python in Excel
• GitHub Copilot extension for VS Code
• Azure OpenAI Service
• PyCascades 2024
• PyCon US 2024
• DjangoCon US 2024
• The Christmas Song by Nat King Cole
• Home by Stephanie Mills

Intro Song: Pastel

Producer: Blue.P

Music provided by LogSquare

Get ready to be captivated by one of the most inspiring episodes of the Sad Python Girls Club podcast, featuring the incredible Jay Miller! Join us as we delve into Jay's Python journey, starting with attempts to "pythonize" their way out of a job to their unwavering dedication to the vibrant Python community 🐍. Tune in for an episode full of Python, productivity and music talk 🎶 and discover the incredible work Jay and other passionate folks have been doing to enhance representation of Black and People of Color in our beloved Python Community, featuring some invaluable advice on how we can all become better allies and foster an inclusive and welcoming space to all 🤗🌈

Links and resources:

• Jay Miller @ GitHub
• Python Community News
• Conduit podcast
• Jay Miller's YouTube shorts
• Jay Milller's previous conference talks
• San Diego Python Group
• Melanie Arbor and Jay Miller's Keynote @ DjangoCon US 2022
• Pyladies
• PyCon Africa
• AfroPython
• Thinking bout you by Frank Ocean
• Face Down by The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus

Intro Song: Pastel
Producer: Blue.P
Music provided by LogSquare

Can you believe it's already the first podcastversary of the Sad Python Girls Club? Neither can we! 🎂 Thank you again for listening to the podcast (and reading this description), let's get ready for another year of ice cream suggestions and emo songs! 🎶

In this episode we discuss whether AI tools can be considered mainstream or not, the Copilot X conversational feature in VS Code, and what's on the horizon for Copilot.  🔮

We also talk about the roadmap for the Python extension, and how the modular extension strategy fits into VS Code's vision of a snappy experience. 

Links and resources:

• GitHub Copilot X, the umbrella of Copilot technical previews that includes ChatGPT support in VS Code
• Replit Ghostwriter
• Amazon CodeWhisperer
• Google Bard
• Google Graveyard - Killed by Google
• Zed
• VS Code pets extension
• Python extension's current & previous iteration plans
• Python tools extension template
• Nobody's Home by Avril Lavigne
• Pity Party by Melanie Martinez

Intro Song: Pastel
Producer: Blue.P
Music provided by LogSquare

Welcome to the 17th episode of the Sad Python Girls Club Podcast! Our special guest this time around is Dr. Sarah Kaiser, Senior Developer Advocate at Microsoft. Sarah is an experimental physicist 👩‍🔬 with a PhD in Quantum Computing, and in this episode she talks a bit of her professional journey from academia 🎓  to software engineering 💻 and now to advocacy 👩‍💻, with Python being there every step of the way.  

This is a super fun and inspiring episode, where we dive into Sarah's passion for helping others working on scientific Python applications find and use the right tools to create amazing things. We also get a sneak peek into some of the amazing stories from her career, featuring some laser-shooting 💥 and a lot of Python 🐍.

This episode was recorded on March 24th, 2023.  

Links and resources:

• Sarah Kaiser's website
• Sarah @ Mastodon
• Sarah @ GitHub
• Sarah @ LinkedIn
• Pyladies
• Quantum mechanics
• Mathematica
• Quantum key distribution devices: How to make them and how to break them, by Dr. Sarah Kaiser
• PyCascades 2023
• Sarah's talk at PyCascades, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Development Environment"
• Dev containers
• Duecredit Python package
• NumFOCUS
• SciPy community
• Unitary fund
• Soojin Choi's episode
• VS Code extensions:
• Live Share
• Data Wrangler
• Jupyter notebooks
• VS Code Profiles
• Anaconda
• Python extension's Create environment command
• GitHub Jupyter Notebook Rich Diff feedback discussion
• GitHub Codespaces
• To Zanarkand, part of Final Fantasy X Soundtrack

Intro Song: Pastel
Producer: Blue.P
Music provided by LogSquare

Welcome to the 16th episode of the Sad Python Girls Club Podcast! 🐍 We're thrilled to have Isidor Nikolic, aka the VS Code historian, as our special guest this time around! Isidor not only holds the position of Senior Program Manager at the VS Code team, but he's also been working on the editor since day one! 🤯

In this episode, Isidor shares his experience working as a Software Engineer on the VS Code debugger 🪲, his journey to becoming a PM, his contributions to making VS Code more accessible, and all about how VS Code is managed and developed. Tune in and join us as we delve deeper into the story behind everyone's favorite code editor! 👩‍💻

Links and resources

• Isidor Nikolic @ GitHub
• Monaco editor
• Vscode.dev 
• Github.dev
• Find the current iteration plan for VS Code, pinned at the top of the repo
• Latest VS Code update and release notes
• Erich Gamma's Keynote on developing VS Code in the open 
• Debugging in VS Code
• The Debug Adapter Protocol
• The Language Server Protocol
• LSIF
• Accessibility in VS Code
• You can't always get what you want by the Rolling Stones

Intro Song: Pastel
Producer: Blue.P
Music provided by LogSquare

Welcome to the 15th episode of the Sad Python Girls Club Podcast! 🐍 We're excited to have Alice Li, Senior Researcher and the tech lead for the Copilot Model Improvements team at GitHub, as our guest this time around. With all the buzz surrounding OpenAI and ChatGPT, it's an honor to have her with us to discuss her work on GitHub Copilot, and get her take on the Generative AI trend, and whether it will replace humans in the future 🤖

Links and resources:

• Alice Li @ GitHub
• Alice Li @ LinkedIn
• GitHub Copilot
• GitHub Copilot VS Code extension
• TensorFlow
• PyTorch
• StyleGAN
• "This Person Does Not Exist" website
• GPT-2
• GPT-3
• DALL-E
• Stable Diffusion
• ChatGPT
• Tay (Twitter bot)
• Impostor syndrome
• Red Desert by Puce Mary
  
  
  

Intro Song: Pastel
Producer: Blue.P
Music provided by LogSquare

Get ready for an exciting episode of the Sad Python Girls Club Podcast, episode #14! It's the first episode of 2023 🎆 and we're kicking off the new year with a blast! 💥 Our special guest this time around is the one and only Savannah Ostrowski, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft. Savannah is going to take us on a journey as she shares her experience transitioning from Software Engineering to Product Management while building Pylance from the ground up 🐍. You won't want to miss this episode as Savannah dives into the main challenges her team faced, the lessons their learned and all about her new role as the product lead of the Azure Developer CLI! 👩‍💻

A few links and resources:

• Savannah @ GitHub
• Pylance extension for VS Code
• Announcing Pylance
• Announcing Pylance as the default language server for Python in VS Code
• Savannah's work on using qualitative and quantitative methods to improve the unresolved imports experience in VS Code
• Azure Developer CLI
• Awesome AZD Templates
• I'm not ok by My Chemical Romance
• Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge by My Chemical Romance

Intro Song: Pastel
Producer: Blue.P
Music provided by LogSquare

Welcome to the last episode of the Sad Python Girls Club Podcast for 2022! Just in time for the new year, in this episode your hosts Kim-Adeline and Luciana reflect over a few of the 2022 highlights in the Python world 🐍, and share their personal and professional goals for the upcoming year. Join us on a (short) memory lane ride over conferences, talks, feedback, survey insights and new releases, and find out what we're looking forward to and planning for 2023 📝.   We'd like to thank you so much for listening to and following our podcast over this past year, and we hope you'll join us again in 2023. Above all, we wish you all a happy new year! 🎆

Links and resources:

• 2021 Python Developers Survey
• 2022 Stack Overflow Developer Survey
• Fast API
• What's New in Python 3.11
• Inside the Faster CPython Team at Microsoft
• Graham Wheeler's SPGC episode
• GitHub Copilot
• GitHub Universe Day 1 keynote (Python bit ~8:40)
• GitHub Universe official website
• Harald Kirschner's talk at GitHub Universe
• After the matter update: Copilot cannot predict the future, as Argentina is the well deserved      winner of the 2022 World Cup!
• PyCascades 2023 in Vancouver
• Kim-Adeline's talk at PyCon US 2020
• PyScript
• Experimental Python for Web
• De Diepte by S10
• Home by Michael Bublé

Intro Song: Pastel
Producer: Blue.P
Music provided by LogSquare

Welcome to this new episode of the Sad Python Girls Club podcast! In this episode we are having a blast with Dawn Wages, who's not only the Python Community Product Manager at Microsoft, but also a PSF director, DjancoCon organizer, Wagtail CMS core team member, and boundless reservoir of energy 🔋

"I feel like it's people, who are the solution to all of the world's woes, and code is but a tool." Dawn's powerful statement summarizes this episode, where we talk about the evolution of Django and DjangoCon, shaping codes of conduct while being mindful of ethical questions, and a few thoughts and avenues on how to make communities more welcoming 🤝

Links and resources:

• Dawn Wages @ GitHub
• Dawn Wages @ Twitter
• Dawn Wages' personal website
• Python Software Foundation
• Django framework
• DjangoCon US 2022
  • DjangoCon US Code of Conduct
  • Panel Discussion: The State of Django @ DjangoCon US 2022 
• Wagtail CMS 
• Django Girls
  • Django Girl handbooks
• The Contributor Covenant 
• The Land Before Time
• Dawn's first talk with dinosaur archetypes
• Fix You by Coldplay

Intro Song: Pastel
Producer: Blue.P
Music provided by LogSquare

Welcome to another episode of the Sad Python Girls Club Podcast! This time our special guest is Graham Wheeler, the Principal Group Software Engineering Manager for the Python runtime team at Microsoft 🏃

In this episode we talk about how Graham first got started with Python, how Pylance originated, and even how Microsoft ended up with an entire team working on making CPython faster ⚡🐍

One small correction from our conversation: the Python performance improvements mentioned around the 19-minute mark is/will be available on Python 3.11 and Python 3.12.

This episode was recorded on September 9th, 2022.

A few links and resources:

Graham Wheeler @ GitHub

Player pianos 

Transcribing player piano rolls with Python

Pylance for VS Code

Pyright

Typing in Python

Python type checking @ Real Python

Type checking mode and other settings with Pylance

Typeshed

Microsoft's Python Type Stubs

Pandas stubs

Try Python inlay hints in VS Code

Jay Miller's video on Python inlay hints

Python Community News (now with 15+ episodes already!)

More about the CPython performance team work

Python in Minecraft

Python @ the Windows store

Kissing by Bliss

Intro Song: Pastel
Producer: Blue.P
Music provided by LogSquare

This is the 10th episode of the Sad Python Girls Club Podcast, and we're excited to have Erik De Bonte as our special guest! Erik is a Principal Software Engineer working on Pylance, the default language server for Python in Visual Studio Code 🐍. In this episode, he shares his learnings and work on typed Python and a bit about what it was like ramping up on Pylance while also writing a PEP for the first time 🤯

To celebrate the release of our 10th episode, we also made a bingo card that you can use to cross-off things that may happen in each of our episodes 😝. Check it out!

As usual, here are a few of the resources and references we mentioned throughout the episode:

• Erik De Bonte @ GitHub
• Pylance extension for VS Code
• Real Python (& their podcast!)
• Fluent Python by Luciano Ramalho
• Advanced Visual Studio Code for Python Developers by Anthony Shaw
• Pyright, the type checker that powers up the Pylance experience in VS Code
• Pyre
• PyType
• Typing sig mailing list
• Python Data Classes
• PEP 557 - Data Classes
• PEP 681 - Data Class Transforms
• The dataclass_transform decorator
• Python 3.11 (which is out now!)
• Descriptors in Python
• Is This Band Emo? website: isthisbandemo.com
• Nobody's Hero by Rush

Intro Song: Pastel
Producer: Blue.P
Music provided by LogSquare

Welcome to the spookiest episode of the Sad Python Girls Club Podcast! 🎃👻

Just in time for Halloween, in this episode your hosts Kim-Adeline and Luciana share some scary stories related to ☠️security ☠️ in the tech world (I know, terrifying topic, right?) and even to the Python extension for VS Code 🐍

A few links related to the scary stuff that we talked about:

• Phishing attempt towards PyPI users
• Python Bytes episode #299, where they talk a bit more about the incident above
• Ransomware on PyPI incident
• Linux kernel incident
• npm package incident
• Open issue for auto indentation with Python in VS Code
• Decode by Paramore
• It's Almost Halloween by Panic! At the Disco
• Sad Python Girls Club playlist on Spotify! 🎶

Intro Song: Pastel
Producer: Blue.P
Music provided by LogSquare

Welcome to another episode of the Sad Python Girls Club Podcast! 🐍 This time we're thrilled to host Don Jayamanne, the creator of the Python extension for Visual Studio Code! 🥇 In this episode Don talks about his journey, from creating what's now the most popular extension for VS Code, to being a software engineer at Microsoft now working on the Jupyter extension (as well as becoming one of the most popular VS Code extension creators/publishers out there in the Marketplace 😎).

A few relevant links:

• Don Jayamanne @ GitHub
• Blog post announcement when Don joined Microsoft back in 2017
• Sad Python Girls Club episode with Soojin Choi, the PM for the Jupyter extension
• Don's Git History extension
• Don's Python Environment Manager extension (and our blog post featuring it)
• All of Don's VS Code extensions

Intro Song: Pastel
Producer: Blue.P
Music provided by LogSquare

Here's a new episode of the Sad Python Girls Club Podcast! 🐍 This time we're with Soojin Choi, the Product Manager for the Jupyter Notebooks 📒 extension for Visual Studio Code. In this episode we talk about the new features the Jupyter team has been working on, how it's like being a PM, and resilience while working in tech 🧑‍💻.

A few links for the things we talked about in this episode:

• Soojin Choi @ GitHub
• Jupyter extension for VS Code
• How to connect VS Code to a remote Jupyter server
• VS Code on the browser
• Microsoft Leap program
• Imposter syndrome in Wikipedia
• Someone lilke you by Adele
• Dirty Little Secrets by All American Rejects

Welcome to another episode of the Sad Python Girls Club Podcast! This episode is full of end of summer vibes 🌥️, featuring Anthony Kim talking about the end of his summer internship on the Python extension for Visual Studio Code 🐍! Come learn all about his project, some tips on how to get started with contributing to the Python extension and how you can actually make more money 💵  with Python 👀

Here are some of the things we referenced in this episode:

- Anthony Kim @ GitHub

- Anthony's PR for rewriting unittest execution

- yahoo-finance package on PyPI

- Python @ Microsoft blog website, where we will post our release updates featuring Anthony's work

- Kiss the rain by Yiruma

- Sad Python Girls Club playlist on Spotify! 🎶

Intro Song: Pastel
Producer: Blue.P
Music provided by LogSquare