Brandon Rhodes

Twitter is where I interact with the community.
Instagram is my most active social media.
GitHub is where I share my code.
Less active these days: Flickr, Stack Overflow
Email: brandon@rhodesmill.org

I also have a page of links that lead to other people’s writing:

Essential Reading — links to several articles that have been important to my own thinking, and that you might be interested in reading if some of my own ideas have interested you.

Greatest Hits

“The Mighty Dictionary” Talk — My first big PyCon talk, and probably still my most popular.
“Pandas From the Ground Up” Tutorial — Hundreds of people have gotten started with the Pandas data library thanks to this tutorial, available as a YouTube video plus matching Jupyter notebooks. (Alas, the video also includes the conference coffee breaks.) I still keep the exercises up to date and make sure they work with the latest version of Pandas.
Python Design Patterns — A site where I’m writing up all of the old Gang of Four design patterns for Python programmers, weighing which ones are still useful in a modern dynamic language.
The Geology of the North Kaibab Trail — My first foray into earth science and cartography, this essay describes the rock layers that hikers traverse as they climb the Grand Canyon’s famous North Kaibab Trail.
Semantic Linefeeds — An essay advocating a practice from early in UNIX history: putting line breaks between sentences or phrases instead of when the line simply reaches a certain length, if you’re writing marked-up plain text that will be reformatted before the user reads it. The habit makes it easier to navigate, edit, and rearrange text.

Open-Source Software

You can see my full list of repositories on my GitHub account, but my most popular packages are:

Skyfield — A Python library that generates coordinates for stars, planets, and satellites using modern idiomatic conventions and the NumPy vector library.
PyEphem — My earlier foray into generating astronomy coordinates for Python. Still popular despite its awkward type conventions.
logging_tree — A small elegant companion for Python’s logging module. I am happy that one of my libraries, at least, still supports every Python version back to Python 2.3.

Talks

You can either browse my full list of recorded talks, or else jump to the description of a particular talk using one of the links below:

2025 April 23	Keynote: Skip the Design Patterns — Architecting with Nouns and Verbs
2024 April 20	Forcing unittest to function
2023 November 16	The History of a Science Hidden in Astronomy Code
2023 April 1	Keynote: Walking the Line
2022 November 24	The Classic Design Patterns: Where Are They Now?
2021 June 19	Keynote: The Contingent Build System
2019 November 20	When Python Practices Go Wrong
2019 August 3	Keynote: The Antipodes
2019 June 16	Keynote: Typesetting with Python
2018 November 23	Keynote: Activation Energy
2018 November 7	Python as C++’s limiting case
2018 August 19	An Import Loop and a Fiery Reentry
2017 December 2	Keynote: Animating with ASCII
2017 October 21	Keynote: You look at it till a solution occurs
2017 May 20	The Dictionary Even Mightier
2016 November 13	Using Python to power Selenium at scale
2016 October 21	Plone Conference Keynote: Python Web Technologies
2016 September 16	PyCon UK Keynote: Python and the Glories of the UNIX Tradition
2016 February 20	PyCaribbean Keynote: When Languages Meet
2016 January 13	The design of the ‘Assay’ testing framework
2015 May 26	Keynote: Stopping to Sharpen Your Tools
2015 May 25	Hoisting Your I/O
2015 April 19	Oh, Come On. Who Needs Bytearrays?
2014 October 12	Keynote: Building the Medieval Universe
2014 September 4	Keynote: Django, a Data Shovel With a Future
2014 August 17	Keynote: How To Shut Down Tolkien
2014 July 27	The Clean Architecture in Python
2014 July 26	Watch your Python script with strace
2014 April 13	The Day of the EXE Is Upon Us
2014 April 11	All Your Ducks In A Row: Data Structures in the Standard Library and Beyond
2014 February 8	Keynote: Moving Targets
2013 August 10	Skyfield and 15 Years of Bad APIs
2013 July 27	Keynote: Sine Qua Nons
2013 May 15	Keynote: Copernican Refactoring
2013 March 15	The Naming of Ducks: Where Dynamic Types Meet Smart Conventions
2013 January 11	Touring the Universe with Scientific Python
2012 November 10	A Python Æsthetic: Beauty and Why I Python
2012 July 29	Python Design Patterns 1
2012 March 12	Flexing SQLAlchemy's Relational Power
2012 March 11	Python, Linkers, and Virtual Memory
2011 September 24	Know Thy Database
2011 July 31	Procedures, Objects, Reusability: httplib, urllib2, and Their Discontents
2011 July 31	Names, Objects, and Plummeting From The Cliff
2011 July 30	Squinting at Python Objects
2010 February 19	Learning Hosting Best Practices From WebFaction
2010 February 19	The Mighty Dictionary
2008 March 15	Using Grok to Walk Like a Duck

Recent Writing

Much of my most recent prose is at my site https://python-patterns.guide/, a work-in-progress where I’m starting to assemble many of the ideas from my talks into writing.

The posts I’ve made here on my personal site are:

2019 August 23	Animating Ptolemy’s Equant with Python, SVG, and CSS
2018 August 4	Animating Saturn with matplotlib, a subclass, and mock.patch()
2018 June 16	Learning SymPy while eliminating trigonometry from rotations
2018 March 31	Computing a final Tiangong-1 pass with Python
2018 March 30	A New Driver for the Original Twiddler
2017 August 3	Fixing OpenConnect’s VPN Search Domains on Ubuntu
2016 June 9	PyCon Trivia Night, Third Edition

Complete list of posts • RSS symbol Atom Feed

Foundations of Python Network Programming

I have twice revised the book Foundations of Python Network Programming for Apress Media. For the most recent Third Edition, I updated its code to Python 3 and expanded coverage of libraries like Requests, Paramiko, and ØMQ. I have made all of the book’s example code available in this GitHub repository:

All 108 Python example scripts from the book

Note that both of the links to the book (text and image) above are Amazon affiliate links, which generate a bit more income for an author than does an anonymous link — but you can also find the book through a quick search for its title.