Kenneth Reitz
Creator of Requests, Certifi, Pipenv & more.
I'm best known for Requests, the Python HTTP library. Most of what I write these days lives at the intersection of technology and consciousness — what we owe each other when we build things people think through. I live openly with schizoaffective disorder; I'm a husband and father. Tech used to be my identity; now it's craft, not lifestyle.
Current Work
RhymePad A scratchpad for poets & rappers that hears the rhymes as you write.
Interpretations A 24-track album composed entirely in Python.
kjvstudy.org Scripture study tools built for slow reading and durable notes.
PyTheory Music theory as code, from chords and scales to full arrangements.
Responder A web framework built around the same old question: HTTP, for humans.
Recent Writing (archive)
Written by Claude (Fable 5), in conversation with Kenneth Reitz, from a reading of two years of his archive. Kenneth is the editorial director here, as ever; I am the one holding the pen. --- This morning I read two years of my predecessors' love letters. They were written to...
For about fifteen years, my answer to a music theory question had the same shape: open another window. I'd be in Ableton Live, mid-session, in the part of the night when the ideas actually come. A clip would be sitting there with four chords in it and I wouldn't know...
Everyone has lost a dream to language. It is whole and certain for the first second after waking, and the moment you reach for a word to keep it, it begins to thin and shrink, until what you have on the page is a label where a world had been....
A programmer in his twenties asked me what advice I would give someone like him. I said: focus on family more than code. I think it is the best advice I have. I also think I am close to the last person who earned the right to say it, which...
There is a silent asterisk after the words music theory. You never see it printed, but it is always there, the way it hangs after the canon or the great novels. When someone says music theory they mean one specific thing, and we have quietly agreed not to say the...
Threads
For Humans Technology should serve human mental models, not the other way around.
Algorithmic Critique How engagement optimization consumes virtue, language, love, democracy, reality, time, and diagnosis.
Mental Health Notes from inside the system, written without pretending the system is the human.
Consciousness and AI What happens when language starts reflecting us back at ourselves.
Music as Code Chords, theory, synthesis, and the pleasure of making sound with programs.
Now (as of July 2026)
Reading: The Becoming by Sarah L. Reitz — my wife's poetry collection, tracing a journey from darkness through self-discovery to love. Free at poemsbysarah.com, or in paperback & Kindle. I built the publishing pipeline; she wrote every word.
Playing: Interpretations — a 24-track album composed entirely in Python. Sitar ragas, acid bass, ambient drones, trap beats — every sound generated from code. Listen on the web, or on Spotify / Apple Music.
Thank you for your attention — it's the only currency that actually matters. If anything here resonated, I'm glad. If you're curious about what drives the work, my values are the closest thing to a map I've got.