[Baypiggies] North Bay Pythonic Companies?

[Shannon -jj Behrens]

On Nov 14, 2007 11:50 AM, Craig Smith <craigfrazersmith at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All:
>
> I'm looking for any advice you might have about North Bay companies that
> use Python.

There's O'Reilly.

> 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.

Ask "Ben Bangert" <ben at groovie.org>.

> -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).

Ah, those were the days ;)

> 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

Ah, those were the days too ;)

> 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..."

Hey, wait, that was me! :-D

Everyone should take a crack at writing some subset of Lisp is his
career.  If you follow the "Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours"
tutorial http://halogen.note.amherst.edu/~jdtang/scheme_in_48/tutorial/overview.html,
you'll get a chance to write Scheme in Haskell, which is like a
two-for-one.  It's actually not that bad if you just take your time
and follow the instructions.  Just don't try to do the exercise; they
aren't for mere mortals (or at least, I found them impossible).

> 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.

Nice ;)

Happy Hacking!
-jj

-- 
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