Meet Paul Bailey: Building Google Actions with Python
This post is part of a series introducing the speakers at the PyBay2018 conference in San Francisco later this month. It’s a great chance to learn and connect with an engaged and diverse community of Python developers. We hope you’ll join us!
What are you going to be speaking about at PyBay2018, and why are you excited to give this talk?
I’m talking about building Google Actions with Python. I’m excited to give this talk because Google Actions is a voice platform that spans multiple devices such as home speakers, phones, and laptops. And with just a little bit of Python you can create amazing voice interactions.
How did you get into programming and Python?
I started by building websites for churches and clubs that I was involved with during high school and college. After graduating with an aerospace degree and working at the Johnson Space Center in Houston TX, I found that we had to write a lot of our own software for engineering tasks. NASA uses a lot of Python. After much reluctance because Perl was my first love, I started writing Python GUIs with Tkinter. Eventually, I was writing software for at least 50% of my time as an engineer and loved it. I switched into programming full time and using Python a majority of the time.
What’s one of the features about Python you like the best?
Mainly I love Python because it is a higher level language that lets you focus on your problem more and how to code it less. Eventually, you need to optimize and worry about some of those details but for many problems you can use Python at a high level and write simple, elegant code to solve it.
What’s your favorite Python library (core or third-party), and why?
By far Django. In the area of web development Django can really jump start your programming. It gives you many tools for building web apps and reduces the number of things you need to worry about. Even when I’m not using Django, I often look at it for best practices in areas like security.
What’s the coolest or most memorable thing that’s ever happened to you interacting with other Python devs?
I live in Texas but occasionally visit the Bay Area and go to Python meetups their. During one of the meetups, out of the hundreds of developers their that night, I met a developer who worked on the same small project that I worked on like 5 years earlier. I promptly apologized for any bad code my former self might have come up with.
What can you be found doing when you’re not writing code?
More coding, but also training for triathlons. I just moved close to a lake so I can train more in swimming.
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