Calvin Hendryx-Parker joins Python Bytes as Co-Host

TL;DR: Calvin Hendryx-Parker is the new permanent co-host of Python Bytes, starting with episode 483 on June 9th, 2026. After almost 10 years, Brian Okken, who founded the show with me back in 2016, has decided it’s time for him to move on.

We have some major news to announce over at Python Bytes. We are welcoming a new co-host to the show: Calvin Hendryx-Parker. After almost 10 years, Brian Okken who founded the show with me, Michael back in 2016 has decided it’s time for him to move on. On the air I called it the next generation of Python Bytes.

New to Python Bytes?

If you haven’t run across the show before, Python Bytes is a weekly Python news podcast. We launched it on November 7th, 2016 and we’ve published over 480 episodes since. Each week the hosts each bring a handful of items we genuinely found interesting: new libraries, language changes, tools worth your time, and the occasional thing that just made us laugh. It’s short, it’s fast, and the goal is that you stay current on the Python world without having to track a dozen feeds yourself.

We record it live and put the video on YouTube, and you can subscribe however in your podcast player of choice, the RSS feed, or just browse the back catalog.

Thank you Brian

Brian and I started Python Bytes together in late 2016 and did it side by side for just a few months short of 10 years. That’s a genuinely remarkable run for a podcast, and almost none of it happened by accident. Brian showed up week after week, for nearly 500 episodes, with things worth talking about.

What I valued most about Brian is that he came at Python from a completely different direction than I did. I’ve spent my career in the web world. Brian has spent his building electronic test equipment for wireless communications: communication testers, oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, and satellite test systems. As he puts it on his own site, he was “building the code inside (C++), and testing them from the API (Python).”

That gap is exactly why the show worked. Two decades of R&D on real hardware gave Brian a testing perspective that was rigorous, hard-won, and deeply practical, and it’s a perspective my web-and-services world would never have produced on its own. When he picked an item each week, it often came from a part of our industry I simply don’t live in. That’s also why he wrote Python Testing with pytest, now in its second edition from Pragmatic Bookshelf, and why he ran the Test & Code podcast for ten years and 238 episodes. He’s also one of the most frequent guest in Talk Python history.

Brian isn’t going anywhere in the Python world, so if you want to keep up with him: he’s writing over at testandcode.org, he still maintains pytest-check, he’s working on a new book called Lean TDD, and he has a pytest course at Talk Python Training.

Thank you for a decade of episodes, Brian. It was a real pleasure.

Meet Calvin

Calvin is a great fit for the show and I am so excited that he agreed to join and share his unique view of the Python developer space.

He’s the co-founder and CTO of Six Feet Up, a Python consultancy he started with his wife Gabrielle (the company’s CEO) back in 1999. They’ve been doing Python professionally for over 25 years, for clients like Capital One, NASA, Purdue, and the UN Environment Programme. He’s also an AWS Community Hero, named in 2019, and he helped build the Python and cloud communities in Indiana as a co-founder of IndyPy and the founder of IndyAWS.

Longtime listeners may already know his voice. Calvin has been on Talk Python several times, including Scaf: Complete blueprint for new Python Kubernetes projects and, most recently, All of our tools.

Here’s why I think he’s the right person for this chair.

He’s a terminal person, unapologetically. In his own words from that tools episode: “I’m definitely a terminal first person. I always have been, even since college. When I first got introduced to the terminal and typed vi tutor for the very first time, I was hooked.” He’s been carrying the same set of dotfiles around for 20 years. But it isn’t nostalgia, it’s about speed: “tools like Ruff and uv have proven to us that the fastest speed as a developer is staying out of our way as we’re thinking through problems, and I don’t want the terminal to be one of those laggy bits.” That’s exactly the right instinct for a show that covers developer tooling every single week.

He’s deep in the cloud. He created Scaf, Six Feet Up’s open source blueprint for running Django on Kubernetes, and he’s still actively working the hard parts of cloud infrastructure and security. Deployment and operations are where a lot of Python packages finally meet reality, and having someone on the mic who does that professionally is going to make those conversations much better.

He has the consultant’s view. When you run an agency, you see a lot of codebases, a lot of stacks, and a lot of technology decisions play out over years. As Calvin put it: “Because of the breadth of work we do with clients, we’re always experimenting with new technology, but we’re not chasing the bleeding edge for its own sake.” On a news show, that filter is worth a lot. The question isn’t just “what’s new,” it’s “what’s actually worth adopting.”

To be clear, Calvin isn’t a replacement for Brian, and he shouldn’t be. He’s a third distinct angle on Python. That’s what keeps a two-host show from turning into two people agreeing with each other.

Give it a listen

If you only listen to one episode to get a feel for the new lineup, make it All our tools. It’s honestly the best episode we’ve done. Calvin and I go deep on the tools we actually reach for every day, and it’s the clearest picture yet of the perspective he brings to the show.

From there, go back to episode 483 to hear the handoff itself, or just grab the latest episode and jump right in.

Welcome aboard, Calvin. And thank you, Brian, for 10 wonderful years.