Seth Larson on making things

You’ve probably used code touched by Seth Larson - he’s the lead maintainer for one of the most widely-used Python libraries, urllib3, and he works on open-source security at the Python Software Foundation. But his personal blog is a different animal entirely, with delightful oddities like Hand‑drawn QR codes, Post Malone Oreos, and “Food JPEGs” mixed in.As part of the Making things project (intro here), I wanted to ask Seth how he chooses what to make and how that contrasts with his open-source work. We met via video call and talked about idea catalogs, taking up space, and the “killer of creativity”. Bobbie Chen (BC): When anything is possible, how do you decide what to create?Seth Larson (SL): I do less and less planning these days; I’d say I let ideas grow. My main “process”, if you could call it that, is to notice something, text it to myself, and keep a catalog of ideas. Most of these ideas don’t pan out. But over time, the most interesting ideas will accumulate lots of related…