E101: Building the Fastest Growing Data Validation Library
Aug 22, 2023
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Samuel Colvin, Founder of Pydantic, discusses the growth and developer experience of their data validation framework, Pydantic. They prioritize empathy in API design and engage with the community through surveys. The podcast also touches on the challenges of open-source development and the roadmap for the future.
Pydantic's growth can be attributed to its timely solution for ensuring type safety in real-world data and its commitment to developer experience.
Pedantic's pragmatic approach balances correctness and simplicity, making it easy for both novice and experienced developers to use and gaining recognition and trust across various industries and organizations.
Deep dives
Pedantic: Enforcing Type Hints for Real-World Data in Python
Pedantic is a data validation library for Python that enforces type hints for real-world data. It takes type hints, which are annotations for the expected types of variables, and provides a way to enforce them. This helps developers avoid bugs and ensures that data conforms to the specified types. Pedantic is widely used, with notable applications in web frameworks like FastAPI and organizations like NASA and the UN. It simplifies the development process and improves the reliability of Python code by providing a powerful data validation solution.
The Origin and Growth of Pedantic
Pedantic started as an experiment in 2017 to address the frustration of type hints in Python. It gained attention after being uploaded to PIPI and Hackin' News. Over the years, it became increasingly popular as more developers faced similar frustrations with type hints. The rise of web frameworks like FastAPI also contributed to Pedantic's growth. In January 2021, Pedantic's downloads skyrocketed, reaching around 87 million per month. This continued growth led to the creation of the Pedantic company, which raised funds and expanded the team. Pedantic's success can be attributed to its timely solution for ensuring type safety in real-world data and its commitment to developer experience.
Maintaining Developer Experience as a Priority
Pedantic's success is grounded in its emphasis on providing a superior developer experience. The founder's philosophy is to prioritize ease of use, simplicity, and solving real-world problems over strict adherence to computer science principles. Pedantic's pragmatic approach balances correctness and simplicity, offering a way to enforce type hints while allowing some flexibility for conversions or coercion between data types. By making it easy for both novice and experienced developers to use Pedantic, it has gained recognition and trust across various industries and organizations.
Future Directions and Challenges
As Pedantic evolves, its roadmap includes several potential directions. One possibility is exploring observability and analytics as data validation layers become central to many applications. Schema catalogs, leveraging Pedantic models as a source of truth, could enhance data validation practices. Another idea is enabling small applications to define models that encompass user interface and database aspects. However, choosing the right paths and prioritizing features can be challenging. Balancing the development of the open-source package with commercial offerings and ensuring continued engagement with the community are ongoing considerations. Still, Pedantic's position as a widely adopted library and its commitment to developer experience provide a strong foundation for future growth.
Samuel Colvin is Founder of Pydantic, the wildly popular data validation framework and cloud services platform. Their open source Python library has over 15K GitHub Stars and millions of downloads per day.
Pydantic has raised $4M from investors including Sequoia Capital and Partech.
In this episode, we dig into Pydantic's growth curve (linear followed by explosive adoption), what a great developer experience means for them (almost B2C-like in the experience), how they engage with their community through things like surveys that help drive the product roadmap, and more!
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