Brian Okken
Lead Software Engineer at Rohde & Schwarz
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrian Okken is a Lead Software Engineer and longtime engineering team leader based in Portland, Oregon, with 13+ years in senior roles and a continuous software career stretching back to the mid-1990s. He combines deep embedded and test-system experience from companies like HP, Agilent, and Rohde & Schwarz with modern Python tooling expertise—authoring "Python Testing with pytest" and contributing to notable open-source packaging work such as pypa/flit. As a podcast host of Python Bytes, Python People, and Test & Code, he shapes and translates Python community best practices while staying hands-on in backend development and QA. Colleagues know him for bridging rigorous testing discipline with practical delivery, and for quietly improving developer workflows through thoughtful tooling and comprehensive test coverage.
13 years of coding experience
29 years of employment as a software developer
MSCS Computer Science, MSCS Computer Science at University of Oregon
Stackoverflow
2,676reputation
1.1mreached
18answers
2questions
pytest
top-1%
unit-testing
top-5%
python
top-5%
command-line-arguments
top-5%
testing
top-1%
Github Skills (18)
pytest10
python10
testing10
packaging10
file-manipulation9
filesystem9
command-line-arguments9
unit-testing9
fileio9
continuous-integration8
build-automation7
automated-tests6
design-patterns6
junit6
bazel6
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
pypa/flit
Apr 2019 - Nov 2019
Simplified packaging of Python modules
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA EngineerContributions:7 commits, 1 PR, 15 comments in 6 months
Contributions summary:Brian primarily focused on enhancing the project's functionality related to packaging Python modules. Their contributions included adding support for source directory structures, improving module discovery, and writing tests. This involved modifying core files and creating comprehensive tests to ensure the reliability and correctness of the packaging process. Additionally, they merged updates from the upstream repository.
pythonpypipackagingpython-modulessimplified
okken/pytest-param-scope
Oct 2023 - Aug 2024
The pytest parametrize scope fixture workaround.
Contributions:6 releases, 2 reviews, 4 PRs in 10 months
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