How I ended up maintaining a python package with 1M+ downloads?

Talk Page for my talk @ Kochi FOSS April Meetup

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Audio
Talk Page
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Author

Kurian Benoy

Published

Saturday, April 26, 2025

Talk in 30 seconds

Talked about how the frustration of doing the same thing repeatedly led to the creation of the whisper-normalizer Python package. Since I was the first person to put it out in the world, it gained a lot of traction with over 1 million downloads, and factors like Google SEO and LLMs like Perplexity helped. Kavya Manohar and I identified some crucial bugs in the Malayalam Text Normalizer, which we later fixed, although it still requires further work. Towards the end, I shared some exclusive content about my speaking journey so far. I discussed how I started speaking at a small meetup in Kochi and have now spoken at multiple international conferences, including presenting three times at Pycon India by the age of 25.

Questions asked?

  1. How to add a normalizer to new language? What are the changes required to make?

Photos and Videos

Group photo taken at end of talk

The photo of crowd

From Renjith’s talk on Wikidata

Another picture featuring Renjith

From my talk

More pictures of me

Explaining something from the slide

Another picture from the talk

Folks ask questions during the talk

Picture of the crowd. Thanks to KeyValue for providing snacks.

Bits of wisdom from Andrew’s talk on Nix

Overview video of the event