Bryce Boe

Bryce Boe is the long-time maintainer of PRAW, the Python Reddit API Wrapper, which is the most widely used Python library for accessing Reddit's API and the foundation for a large share of Reddit bots, research scripts, and moderation tools. The library handles authentication and exposes a Pythonic interface to subreddits, submissions, comments, and the wider API surface.

The project's lineage began in 2010 when Timothy Mellor created the original reddit_api library. Boe took over maintenance in late 2011, renamed the project PRAW in 2012, and moved it to a dedicated praw-dev organisation on GitHub. A defining feature is that PRAW internally follows Reddit's API rules and automatically respects rate limits, so developers only need to supply an appropriate user agent rather than manage request throttling themselves.

In 2016 a complete rewrite, PRAW4, began, and the project switched from the GPLv3 to the simplified BSD license. Over the following years the library matured through successive major versions and accumulated thousands of stars on GitHub, with documentation hosted on ReadTheDocs and community support run through the r/redditdev subreddit and a project Slack workspace.

PRAW functions as community infrastructure rather than an end-user product: it is the substrate on which much of Reddit's third-party automation is built, funded through volunteer effort and an Open Collective. As such it is also sensitive to API-policy changes, and its role is frequently noted in discussions of how dependent Reddit's developer ecosystem is on open-source maintainers.