Book Release: Publishing Python Packages
Today we’re happy to announce a book release from one of our engineers, Dane Hillard. Dane is Technical Architect for UI Engineering at ITHAKA, and has been instrumental in starting the predecessor of this blog, Build Smarter, as well as reviving it in its current form.
About The Book
Python packages help modularize code and ensure code reusability. Packaging code makes it more accessible to others, and can make your own projects more manageable.
The story around Python packaging has emerged organically over time, and in the last several years it has come to the forefront as one of the areas most in need of attention. The Python Packaging Authority, the working group responsible for managing the standards and public infrastructure of packaging, has put a significant amount of thought and sweat into improving the picture, but many projects big and small have yet to catch up to these advancements.
In addition to the act of packaging and publishing itself, bit rot is a major contributor to burnout for open source and innersource maintainers. Maintenance of even a mature package isn’t free, because platforms and threat vectors and more keep marching along. Automation around testing, dependency management, security, and so on go a long way to easing these pains.
Publishing Python Packages: Test, share, and automate your projects tries to capture this story and make it digestible and actionable for people at any level of experience with package maintenance. The book is a culmination of practices learned and implemented in Dane’s work at ITHAKA, on projects such as our open source apiron package.
If you’re interested in learning more, check out Publishing Python Packages, (available in paperback and as an ebook). You can also follow Dane Hillard’s work.
Want to learn more about what it’s like to work at ITHAKA? Check out our ITHAKA careers page.
About Dane Hillard
Dane Hillard is a technical architect at ITHAKA. He has been developing web applications in Python and Django, and more recently in JavaScript and micro frontends with the UI Engineering team. As a technical architect, Dane’s areas of focus are in modular software design and delivery as well as the safety and incident management practices at ITHAKA.
