David Beazley: Discovering Python

  • Is this the “Let’s reimplement WebAssembly in Python” guy? YES!
  • Great talk! He was injected into an ongoing patent case as a fact expert, and was sent to a literal vault containing 1.5TB data comprising:
    • Source code for all of the target company’s systems, hardware and otherwise
    • 800 snaphots of the source code over the last 15 years
  • No electronics were allowed in, so he was stuck with Windows XP, Notepad & Visual Studio to figure this out.
  • Python happened to be on the machine, so he reimplemented basic UNIX commands as Python functions, and went from there to make sense of all this data.
  • Seems like a great way to exercise the skill of reading and understanding someone else’s code without any assistance.
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