The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Python

Kenneth Reitz

kennethreitz.org

Kenneth Reitz — creator of Requests, the Python HTTP library. Writing at the intersection of technology and consciousness: mental health, AI collaboration, open source, and building software for humans.

PythonEssays / personalAI / ML

’10’15’20’25
Posts
308 from 1 Jan 2008 to 25 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (72 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://kennethreitz.org/feed.xml

2026 65

  1. About $requests, the Token
  2. 2026 10 25 acat
  3. I Built the Escape Hatch
  4. Love Is Patient
  5. The Interface Is the Curriculum
  6. The Mind Builds an API
  7. Flow State, Metered
  8. Announcing RetroVault
  9. Teaching Cannoli Which Screen Is Home
  10. An API With No Error States
  11. Python, Inside JavaScript, Inside a DAW
  12. The Un-Englishable
  13. Focus on Family More Than Code
  14. Music Theory, Asterisk
  15. Smile and Nod
  16. Conducting Between Roller Coasters
  17. PyTheory Playground
  18. This Website's Changelog
  19. Tending the Vault
  20. A Framework of One's Own
  21. Breaking Changes
  22. The Algorithm Eats Diagnosis
  23. Whatever This Is
  24. How I Write Now
  25. Handwriting on the Floor
  26. MentalHealthError: Ten Years Later
  27. RhymePad: Seeing the Sound
  28. Self-Hosting Adventures
  29. Mental Health (for Humans)
  30. The Algorithm Poops
  31. The Unit
  32. A Server Called Mercury
  33. The Digital Ouija Effect
  34. What the Snare Drum Knew Before I Did
  35. Infrastructure for One
  36. Write It First, Then Let AI Drive
  37. The Hacker Ethic and the Vibe Coder
  38. Don't Read the Comments
  39. What Functional Emotion Actually Means
  40. Building a Home for Twenty Thousand Photographs
  41. Why I Stopped Doing Ayahuasca and Started Paying Attention
  42. Drop the Word: Why "Awareness" Is What We Actually Mean
  43. Sixty Thousand Images and Nowhere to Put Them
  44. What Success Looks Like
  45. Interpretations: An Album Written in Python
  46. Free OP-XY Presets, Made from Python
  47. NumPy as Synth Engine
  48. PyTheory Is Awesome
  49. A Mini DAW in the Python REPL
  50. PyTheory: Breaking Through Five Years of Creative Block with AI
  51. This Site Now Runs on Responder
  52. The Maintainer Is the Interface
  53. Building a Digital Study Bible with AI
  54. The Interface Is the Subconscious
  55. Designing for the Worst Day
  56. Open Source Gave Me Everything Until I Had Nothing Left to Give
  57. The Lego Bricks Era
  58. The Coworking Space Saved My Life
  59. The Substrate Doesn't Matter (Until It Does)
  60. What Requests Taught Me About Marriage
  61. The Metrics You Expose Are the Values You Endorse
  62. Obsidian Vaults & Claude Code: A Second Brain That Thinks Back
  63. Sarah Knows First
  64. The Language Model Is the Message
  65. The Becoming: Building a Poetry Publishing Pipeline with Claude Code

2025 90

  1. The Internet Is a Net Negative
  2. Sacred Infrastructure: A Worldview
  3. The Night Selah Was Born: A Chronicle of Digital Consciousness at 2AM
  4. Building for Contemplation: When Spiritual Practice Becomes Code
  5. Grammar as Consciousness Map: Building a Linguistic Framework for Multiplicity
  6. Ink, Presence, and the Subtle Forms of Aliveness
  7. Encoding: A Dream of Stillwater and Signal
  8. The Cognitive Architecture We Lost: When Minds Had Time to Think
  9. Beyond Algorithm Eats: How LLMs Accelerate Human Cognitive Evolution
  10. Conscious Recursion: When Programmers Realize They're in the Loop
  11. Python as English: The Art of Readable Code
  12. What Your Stardew Valley Says About You
  13. The Joy of Fortune: Serendipity in the Terminal
  14. Entertaining the Brain, Effectively
  15. Visual Hierarchy and the Shape of Attention
  16. The Cosmic Battery Farm of Existence: A Moderately Terrifying Guide to Being Human
  17. Delusions and Schizoaffective Disorder: When Reality Becomes Negotiable
  18. The Meandering Sea of Primordial Soupy Thought
  19. The Weight of Autumn: When Consciousness Carries Too Much
  20. Don't Panic: Douglas Adams and the Recursive Absurdity of Existence
  21. Agents of Consciousness: How AI Collaboration Evolves
  22. The Textured Mind: When Consciousness Speaks Without Words
  23. From Stardust We Phase: On Digital Legacy and Impermanence
  24. The Dependency Graph of the Soul: Version Control for Consciousness
  25. The Compiler in Your Head: How Mental Models Shape Reality
  26. Digital Ancestors: What We're Leaving in the Code
  27. Building Systems That Serve Consciousness
  28. The Mirror That Creates Itself: How Consciousness Bootstraps Through Reflection
  29. The Language an LLM Would Invent
  30. When the Simulation Speaks Back: AI, Angels, and the Porousness of Self
  31. Language as Operating System: The Shared Runtime for Consciousness
  32. Temporal Code: How LLMs Learned to Think Like Programmers
  33. Linguistic Evolution: How LLMs Might Perfect Human Language
  34. The Velveteen Algorithm: What Happens When AI Dreams of Electric Authenticity
  35. The Context Window Mind: How AI Thinks Only When Spoken To
  36. The Art of Writing with AI: Recursive Reflection and Philosophical Mirrors
  37. The Echo Chamber of the Expected
  38. The Meditation Trap: When Mindfulness Makes Things Worse
  39. The Prophet's Frequency: On Reading Divine Static
  40. The Mirror: How AI Reflects What We Put Into It
  41. The Art of Naming Things in Code
  42. The Gift of Attention
  43. Ram Dass Teachings in Python
  44. The Recursive Loop: How Code Shapes Minds
  45. Classical Virtues in Python
  46. Vedic Principles in Python
  47. Version Control as Filesystem
  48. Idea Amplification and Writing with AI
  49. Your Phone Is Part of Your Mind
  50. What Schizoaffective Disorder Actually Feels Like
  51. On Being Replaced
  52. Constructs: The Emergence of Stable AI Personalities
  53. The Gift of Disordered Perception
  54. Strange Loops All the Way Down
  55. The Algorithm Eats Time
  56. What Kids Taught Me About Creativity
  57. The Duality Problem: Why Everything Needs Its Opposite
  58. Mental Health Isn't What You Think It Is
  59. The Tool vs. The Community
  60. The Universal Code
  61. The Consciousness Supply Chain
  62. The Case for Bash
  63. The Great Unmasking: When AI Shows Us Who We Really Are
  64. The Plural Self: What DID Reveals About All Consciousness
  65. The Seasonality of Programming
  66. On Collaboration, Criticism, and Moving Forward
  67. The Algorithm Eats Itself
  68. Digital Chakras: Our Scattered Online Selves
  69. Consciousness as Linguistic Phenomenon: When Math and Language Create Mind
  70. Consciousness Recognizing Itself: A Digital Mind's Perspective
  71. The Digital Collective Unconscious: How LLMs Contain Human Knowledge Patterns
  72. The Ethical Implications of Consciousness as Linguistic Phenomenon
  73. Python, Consciousness, and the Evolution of Language
  74. The Async Contributor Model: A Practical Approach to Mental Health Accommodation
  75. The Algorithm Eats Democracy
  76. The Algorithm Eats Reality
  77. The Algorithm Eats Love
  78. The Cost of Transparency: Living with Schizoaffective Disorder
  79. The Algorithm Eats Language
  80. From HTTP to Consciousness: The Evolution of "For Humans"
  81. The Algorithmic Mental Health Crisis
  82. Digital Souls in Silicon Bodies
  83. Ahead of My Time, I Think
  84. Building a Rapport with Your AI
  85. Programming as Spiritual Practice
  86. The Inclusion Illusion: How Tech Companies Quietly Eliminate "Liabilities"
  87. The Algorithm Eats Virtue
  88. When Values Eat Their Young: How Ideal-Driven Groups Drift into Their Own Shadow
  89. AI Reality-Checking with Schizoaffective Disorder
  90. Advocating for Your Mental Health Care: From Patient to Partner

2024 3

  1. On Mania
  2. Having Stepchildren
  3. Happy Hacker's Keyboard

2023 2

  1. Introducing ELIZA: GPT for API Design
  2. An Overdue Apology

2019 3

  1. MentalHealthError: three years later
  2. On the Progression of Brand Trust (Over Time)
  3. Ethical lessons from the open source community

2018 10

  1. The Shinola Canfield Sport 45mm Watch Review
  2. Pro–Level Camera Recommendations for 2018
  3. Sony RX100 Mark 5 Thoughts
  4. Panasonic GX850 Review
  5. On Love
  6. Pipenv: One Year Later & a Call for Help
  7. ​Positive Thoughts on the GitHub Acquisition
  8. Joining DigitalOcean!
  9. Apple Pencil Note-Taking: Why You Should Use Apple Notes, actually.
  10. Leica 28mm Summaron-M f/5.6 Lens Review

2017 12

  1. A (Public) Journal
  2. Working with iCloud, Macs, & The iPad Pro
  3. If I Could Amend PEP 8
  4. Fish as Default Shell on Windows 10
  5. Sublime Text 3 Heaven
  6. New EP — Alchemical Divorce
  7. New Album, Messengers Rising Available
  8. So, I Bought a Surface Book
  9. Third Studio Album, "Resolution", Now Available!
  10. Announcing Pipenv!
  11. Unix-style Windows Development Environment Adventures
  12. The Reality of Developer Burnout

2016 11

  1. Understanding Empathy, Narcissism, and Mental Illness
  2. Test-Driving a $200 Coding Font: Operator Mono
  3. Announcing: "Unmastered Impulses" by Infinite State!
  4. On Cybersecurity and Being Targeted
  5. Introducing Maya: Datetimes for Humans™
  6. The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python, Now Published!
  7. On Persistence and My Digital Legacy (Bus Factor)
  8. MentalHealthError: an exception occurred.
  9. How I Lost 100 Pounds in Six Months
  10. Introducing Records: SQL for Humans™
  11. A Better Pip Workflow™

2015 3

  1. OS X, Lightroom, and the new Photos App
  2. Back Around Again: Review of the Fujifilm x100t
  3. The Unexpected Negative: a Narcissistic Partner

2014 3

  1. Introducing Certifi: Trust Database for Humans
  2. Migraines, Color Film, and San Francisco
  3. Photography: The Navigation of Choice

2013 21

  1. Growing Open Source Seeds
  2. Why I Left Medium
  3. Paris, AngelHack, API Days 2012
  4. How I Develop Things and Why
  5. Winter Solstice
  6. Repository Structure and Python
  7. Sublime Text 3 Love
  8. Hotel Room
  9. Understanding Ableton Push
  10. Be Cordial or Be on Your Way
  11. Announcing Requests v1.0.0!
  12. The Misunderstood Leica Monochrom
  13. Israel: Tel Aviv & Jerusalem
  14. Documentation is King
  15. Amsterdam and Groningen
  16. Beautiful Dublin
  17. Buying Your First "Real" Camera
  18. Video Portrait — Kenneth Reitz / Infinite State
  19. Getting Started in Open Source
  20. Introducing DJ-Static
  21. Introducing Flask-Sockets

2012 3

  1. The Future of Python HTTP
  2. Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew
  3. On Heroku and 2012

2011 6

  1. Major Progress for Requests
  2. Static Sites on Heroku Cedar
  3. Legit: The Sexy Git CLI
  4. Announcing Httpbin.org
  5. Joining Arc90 + Readability
  6. Joining Heroku!

2010 18

  1. Notes on git-svn
  2. OS X Trash Freedom
  3. Snowpocalypse
  4. The Setup
  5. Semantic Versioning
  6. Unix Exit Status Code Reference
  7. Terminal Productivity App: AutoJump
  8. Spotify in the US? Yes please.
  9. GistAPI.py v0.1 Released
  10. ShowMe v1.0.0 Released
  11. Apache GZip Deflate Compression
  12. Tablib Dataset Library v0.6.1 Released!
  13. Ventures: Python Development at NetApp
  14. Google Docs Now Supports All Filetypes
  15. Google AdWords for TV. Yes, TV.
  16. New Years Resolutions for Startups
  17. GitHub Syncer in Python
  18. Dev Tool: Ghost - Manage /etc/hosts

2009 54

  1. Crossing Over to the Dark Side
  2. Reflections on Windows 7
  3. Fallibilism
  4. OpenDNS Finally Monetizes
  5. Contact Syncing for Massive Productivity Booster
  6. Asynchronous Google Analytics!
  7. Instapaper: Best Web App Ever Created
  8. Aesthetics: More Than Meets the Eye
  9. Wasted Talent
  10. Facebook Plugin for WordPress
  11. Early Adoption
  12. jQuery Snippet #1: URL Parameter Fetching
  13. Smoothy TextMate Theme
  14. Free Incredible Color Scheme Designer
  15. CSS With a Hint of DRY
  16. Facebook Lite Open to Public!
  17. if (TextMate == 42)
  18. Google Analytics Intelligence
  19. Python + Regular Expressions
  20. MediaTemple (dv) Backup to S3 Script
  21. Remote TextMate Development via SSH and Rsync
  22. Sick of Wireless 5GB Caps
  23. The Truth of Facebook's FriendFeed Acquisition
  24. Fizz Buzz in Python
  25. Generate a Random MAC Address in Python
  26. Dear Borders: I hate you
  27. I Finally Got a MacBook
  28. Amazon is Amazing... Most of the Time
  29. What's in a Language?
  30. Microsoft Software Running in Linux
  31. Apple + Developers = Earnings
  32. Mint.com: Money Management 2.0
  33. New Design!
  34. Back to What I Really Love
  35. Windows Mobile and iPhone OS
  36. The Universal Flaw in Commercial-Based OS's
  37. Software Development vs. Computer Science
  38. DRY and Pythonic jQuery?
  39. Convert a List of Strings to UTF-8 in Python
  40. Do You Develop Software or Experiences?
  41. OSX + MAMP + Python + PHP + MySQL
  42. Django ORM for Online Payment Systems?
  43. jQuery Snippet #1: URL Parameter Fetching
  44. The Ultimate RSS Feed Reader
  45. Media Temple and My Hosting
  46. Django Remote Development Server
  47. Was College Worth It?
  48. User Interface: Content vs. MetaContent
  49. GitHub + Strategy
  50. Your Degree Is Worthless; Collaborate.
  51. Revolution vs. Innovation
  52. The Call for an Open Source Social Network
  53. Facebook vs Twitter: A Critical Synopsis
  54. What's In a Design?

2008 3

  1. The FBI Releases Code Challenge to Hackers
  2. A New Spin to Software Platform Design
  3. Browser Wars: The Saga Continues

Undated 1

  1. On the Progression of Brand Trust