Small Django/Python shop. We make a curation product and have actual customers who pay us actual money (crazy concept, I know).
As part of the engineering team you will work on a bit of everything: front end, NLP pipeline, database, devops, support. And if you're a bowler you can join a bunch of us in the Wednesday night league at Lanes & Games.
The roadmap has already changed, BTW. At some point, the plan was to have python 2.x such as to convert so that python 2.x will be very close to python 3, plan which was abandoned AFAIK (I can certainly understand why, though, since it would have required a lot of non-fun work).
Sadly no, but now I know for sure you aren't Jim Baker (the jython commiter).
Most python users have never heard of anyone other than Guido. That's fine because people who contribute to open source projects don't do it for the fame, and that's reasonable because you can't be expected to memorize the names of all the people who wrote the tools you use. That said, it can be frustrating being not Guido (Brett gets heaps of credit inside the community but zero percent of Guido's name recognition).
1st story: my first PyCon I went out to the smokers deck and introduced myself (this was '02 or '03 - I'm not sure we even had name badges). The other guys turned out to be Tim Peters, Christian Tismer, and Alex Martelli. Python jackpot.
2nd story: I told that first story to a random lunch table of people at PyCon last year (as a rule I eat lunch with no one I know at cons) and the collective reaction was: who?
So yeah, don't feel bad about not knowing who Brett is (but do buy him a beer if you run into him). And definitely don't get involved in open source for the fame. [Bonus trivia: Gustavo also has a commit bit, as do a couple other people in this thread]
Jack Diederich (my nick is an old UNIX login, "jackdiederich"[:8]). I'm an invited speaker this year so I'll definitely be there.
At least two automated trading firms sent contingents to PyCon last year so you won't be alone (I think both were state-side). As for microbrews? Although it started with states that had odd blue laws for liquor licenses (limited regular licenses but unlimited for on-premises brewing) you can now find micro-breweries in every major city and most minor ones. PyCon always has a beer BoF group.
You're the guy that wrote decorators! Wouldn't mind checking out your 'I love graphs' lightening talk, there's a lot happening in that space and the lightening talks are often the best content/time value of the whole conference.
Must have missed the beer BoF last year, though managed to imbibe a fair bit anyway (The Map Room in Chicago was great). Will check it out this year & see you there.
No it's not a religious question. You and I can take our respective dieties to task by choosing a test problem, then praying hard to see whose diety exists/answers, etc. Most likely, both of us will be disappointed (otherwise I would have had a jetpack by now :-)
Quality of object systems can be tested by posing a computational problem and letting people solve the problem in their language/object-system of choice, we can then rank the answers by various criteria (development speed, code clarity, code speed, system integration, run-time portability, scaling, maintenance costs, etc.)
"Ruby does it this way and people like it" isn't an argument that will work. You can accomplish the same things in Python with an extra line of overhead.
If you want to get this past python-dev you'll need to explain the benefits, here's a start:
1) Lower cognitive load: Users can understand blocks but the extra naming/reference is one too many things for their brain stack to handle.
2) More descriptive: with blocks the first line says "I'm about to define a function for use with X" instead of the existing way which says "I'm defining a function. Now I'm using that function with X."
3) Show me: take a chunk of an existing project (stdlib is best) and rewrite it with the proposed block syntax. You get to cherry pick the example so if the new version doesn't read much cleaner than the old version maybe the idea isn't so hot.
I'm -1 on the idea but if you want to change my mind you have to make an argument that doesn't start with "In Ruby..."
As a sometimes Python core developer allow me to say stuff. The main goal was to remove mistakes; an all-at-once deprecation. The release was actually much less ambitious than the original name "Python 3000" implied. Guido read one of Joel's posts on rewriting software [the one on the Mozilla rewrite] and dictated that 3.0 be done in a year or two. See the list of PEPs [Python Enhancement Proposals] for silly big changes that were shot down.
As for python 3.0 being 10% slower than 2.5 - that means that it is is just 1.9 times faster than Ruby instead of a clean 2x? And the backwards incompatible version took just two years instead of infinity like Perl and two years instead of the UNK for Ruby? Python 2.5 benefited from a corporate sponsored "Need For Speed" sprint where twenty of the core devs went on a paid vacation with a mission to just sprint on speed issues. There hasn't been a corresponding sponsored event for 3.0.
A huge amount of volunteer time has been spent on backwards compatibility issues. When the Python 3.0 issue was first floated the Twisted and Django folks had lots of worries about the transition and supporting two versions (2.x and 3.x). Hundreds of hours were spent on the email lists and PyCon dinners hashing out the details. Thousands of hours were spent adding warnings and best practices docs to 2.6 as well as on the "2to3" translation tool.
Time will tell but there will certainly be lessons learned from the Python 3 release.
Long story short: CPython uses a custom memory allocator on top of the OS malloc because some mallocs are really bad and python knows more about it's memory usage patterns than the OS. The newer CPython allocator plays better with popular OS's so that repeatedly newing and freeing lots of objects is more likely to return memory to the system.
The old behavior didn't effect server sized systems and typical workloads but it did piss off some embedded apps.
so they spend who knows how much on a four-letter domain and then require a newer version of flash than every other video site on the internet? Brilliant.
Software Engineer, Engineering Manager, UI/UX Frontend (http://www.getcurata.com/careers)
Small Django/Python shop. We make a curation product and have actual customers who pay us actual money (crazy concept, I know).
As part of the engineering team you will work on a bit of everything: front end, NLP pipeline, database, devops, support. And if you're a bowler you can join a bunch of us in the Wednesday night league at Lanes & Games.