[Baypiggies] North Bay Pythonic Companies?

[Craig Smith]

Hi All:

I'm looking for any advice you might have about North Bay companies that 
use Python. In a perfect world such companies would also be hiring, but 
that's not a critical point. If I lived in the south bay I'd be haunting 
the doors of VMWare, IronPort, Google and such like, but I live in far 
off Sonoma County, and am not quite up for a long commute. Yet.
Thanks for your time.

-Craig Smith

About Me: I did QA and Professional Services at NeXT, programming at 
Autodesk, and all that and more at a startup you've never heard of for 
seven years. I'm a Joel-ist about software engineering (1), a Guido-ist 
about language design (2) and am most interested in problem spaces best 
served by Python. My most bankable acronyms are GIS, DBA, and WWW, but 
I’ve been paid to do a fair number of things that usually involved 
systems to move bits from here to there, transforming them along the way.

(1) - I think the Joel Test is about the best description of software 
engineering as I've experienced it. There are many, many, other ways to 
write software. We had some nice people from NASA come and speak to one 
of my university courses and I'm certain they wouldn't recognize what 
I've done as "software engineering" but I've shipped bits on a disk in a 
box that I was proud of. Although none of those bits ever flew a space 
craft.

(2) Best Baypiggies moment for me was in the basement at Ironport(2.1). 
Guido was giving a PyCon presentation and as an aside made a point very 
like his "Language Design is Not Just Solving Puzzles" post. It seemed a 
very, level headed, thing to say.

(2.1) Scariest Baypiggies moment for me was at Stanford when Danny Yoo 
was giving an excellent talk about pyscheme. I was furiously scribbling 
notes about trampolining and such when someone from the audience piped 
up with, "You know, when *I* was implementing Lisp in Python I did it 
this way..." A number of people in the audience all nodded along because 
apparently everyone there had written a Lisp interpreter in Python. You 
know, for fun. Naturally I drove home and banged out a toy Cold Fusion 
--> Python translator, but still, scary moment.