This little blog is to celebrate the discovery of two really nice guys in the same day.

First a little context: I am pretty much a solo act. Python is one of my many interests. I use it for fun and forced intellectual stimulation. The site asks for feedback in a couple of spots but does not beat users over the head for it because I don’t “want” anything from them (you) – you may have noticed there are not even (at least yet) any ads on the site.

I know from Jetpack data that wikipython is being accessed by users literally all over the world every day. I know from emails that it is listed as a resource at several universities around the world. Once in a while someone goes to the trouble to contact me with an error on the site or an idea – very much appreciated – and a couple of times a year I get a note with a comment about how much the site has helped them either generally or specifically. One of those came in today and it makes me smile to think I was helpful. Appreciation is one of the elements of Python users that I think may be not so common in other languages.

I uncovered the other nice guy when I began a new Python project requiring retrieval and manipulation of IPTC data in photographs. This is not the time and place for those technicalities. This is about the fact that I discovered a really helpful module on Pypi (IPTCInfo3) which returns keywords data that looks like this:
[b’Dwight Smith’, b’Sherri Sue Jones’, b’Mary Baker’, b’Christmas’, b’SherriSue Jones’, b’SSJ’]
Of course, you recognize immediately that these have been returned as byte objects.

It took me a couple of hours for my brain to kick in and remember the significance of the leading “b” and before that happened I sent an email to the gentleman listed as the maintainer, James Normail. I didn’t really expect that I would ever hear from him. His response was immediate, though it was delayed coming into my phone. James even offered to call me and explain.

What a nice guy and what a good example of the spirit of Python. I didn’t take him up – having figured it out for myself by then – but I am heartened by his offer of help.