Creator of Python retires from Dropbox

The creator of the open-source Python programming language, Guido van Rossum, goes into retirement. After six and a half years, Dutch programmer, the creator of Python, Guido van Rossum is leaving cloud file storage firm Dropbox. Dropbox team published a blog post headed “Thank you, Guido” on 29 October.

Guido met Dropbox with Python

When we turn back to the history of Python, it has started nearly 30 years ago, but it needed time to become popular worldwide. Rossum met with Dropbox CEO Drew Houston in 2011 and started to give talks at Dropbox. That may be why Dropbox’s server and desktop client software were written almost exclusively in Python.

“So in 2013, Guido joined Dropbox. Since then, he has not only made contributions to Python at Dropbox but also left an everlasting impact on our engineering culture and our people. It started with some of the young engineers Guido met early on,” noted on the blog post.

Rossum talked about the team with the words when he joined the company:

“There was a small number of really smart, really young coders who produced a lot of very clever code that only they could understand. That is probably the right attitude to have when you’re a really small startup,”

The team talked about Guido’s impact on Dropbox:

Guido also had a big impact on our development organization by increasing engineers’ confidence in their testing culture. The team used continuous integration, which means every time a change to the code was submitted, a series of tests would run to make sure there were no problems with the new code.
After getting many fails on tests, as a way to improve the process, Guido joined their team to help fix all the broken tests and develop internal tools which help people who owned the tests to understand why it was broken.

“Guido then switched teams and started working on mypy, now one of the most popular static type checkers for Python, written by a Dropboxer that he had helped hire during his first year here, Jukka Lehtosalo. Mypy started off as Jukka’s Ph.D. research project and started to develop into something more when Jukka met Guido at a Python conference in Santa Clara,” noted about mypy on a blogpost.

The team finished the article with the words “We are so grateful to have had Guido as a part of the Dropbox family, and we wish him the best in his retirement. Thank you, Guido! “

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