PyDev of the Week: Bojan Miletic

This week we welcome Bojan Miletic as our PyDev of the Week! Bojan is an entrepreneur and given talks at EuroPython on Django testing. If you'd like to learn more about Bojan, you can connect with him on LinkedIn.

Let's spend some time getting to know him better!

Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc):

At the moment, my biggest passions are learning french, Russian, and philosophy. I was very lucky that I managed to find incredibly passionate teachers.

Lots of people underestimate the impact of soft skills, but some of the lessons I learned during the last decade that communicational skills are far more important than technical skills. At the end of the day, we are building software for people, with other people.

Going and educating myself in areas outside of software engineering has kept me humble and broadened my horizons, as well as allowed me to approach problems from a variety of different angles.

As for programming itself, I started around 2002 with Dreamweaver and custom maps in Warcraft 3 (not sure if that counts as programming), I've been using it for fun and as a way to earn some pocket money.

I got really humbled during my university years, where we went over assembler, C, C++, Java and C#.

Why did you start using Python?

I was lucky to be able to start my company, after a really long project in PHP and Javascript. After that adventure, I wanted to use something beautiful at the time my main candidates were either Python or Ruby. I've chosen Python and haven't looked back since then.

What other programming languages do you know and which is your favorite?

For the last several years, I've been using Python almost exclusively and working on improving my management and negotiation skills.
To be honest, I'm blindly in love with Python and haven't experimented that much with other languages. (My earlier expertise with Java and C++ is quite low at the moment, do to inactive usage)

What projects are you working on now?

At the moment, in my company Softerrific, I'm working on IoT and fintech projects. I'm really excited about them but tons of NDAs are preventing me from going into more details.
I'm incredibly grateful for my talented teammates and the different perspectives that they bring to the projects.

Which Python libraries are your favorite (core or 3rd party)?

FastAPI. For me, this was a real game-changer. It makes writing APIs incredibly fast, easy to test and code is absolutely elegant. Even my frontend devs loved it since it is very easy to integrate with.

Is there anything else you’d like to say?

I love talking with people about programming and life in general. feel free to connect with me at LinkedIn or schedule a virtual coffee with me on Calendly.

Thanks for doing the interview, Bojan!