How to sell Python panel at Pycon

Do you want to use Python but are you fighting Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) in your organization? Does any of this sound familiar to you?

• Python is just a scripting language.
• Python is too new to use in real production environments.
• Language X has better benchmarks doing obscure math so it is better for web development.
• Python sounds great but we've already spent so much on this expensive tool that does things badly!

A lot of people want to use Python, but their customer, management, school, government, or organization won't let them. Python is a great tool, but can be challenging to get in the door. This panel will explore how companies and individuals have successfully introduced Python, what tools are available to sell Python, how to fight the good fight, and what pitfalls there are to avoid.

Panel Questions
For this event at Pycon I've got some stock questions ready but I want the community at large to suggest some more.

Speakers
For this panel I choose five speakers from the broad categories of academia, government, commercial organizations, and non-profit who have had a known impact in their organizations:

Academia
C. Titus Brown is an Open source hacker, Artificial Life/Digital Evolution, B.A. Math (Reed), Earthshine research, Ph.D. Developmental Biology and Regulatory genomics (Caltech), Python testing tools, Python Software Foundation member, Assistant Professor (Michigan State U.) - dev bio, genomics, metagenomics, software engineering. 

Note: A lot of my personal understanding on how to do web tests outside of Selenium is thanks to a Pycon tutorial given by Dr. Brown and Grig Gheorghiu back in 2008. 

Government
Chris Shenton is a partner at Koansys LLC, a consulting company whose clients include US Federal Government agencies, Internet startups, and non-profit organizations. He is a free software and UNIX bigot, advocating for the use of both in organizations large and small. He's been involved with the Washington DC area's Python/Zope/Plone user group ZPUGDC for years, and recently was appointed to its board. 

Note: Chris has the dubious honor of introducing me to Python in 2005 and was pivotal in promoting the adoption of Python for use in NASA's Science Mission Directorate. 

Large BusinessThe Vice President of Engineering at Evite/IAC, Dan Mesh is the person credited by other Evite staff with bringing Python to life in that business. 

We used Evite for our just passed LA area hackathon and plan to use it for future events. 

Non-Profit Organizations
Rich Leland is an Application Architect at National Geographic where he uses Python on a daily basis to work on nationalgeographic.com and its ecosystem of web sites. He is also the founder of django-district, a group for Django users in the Washington, DC area. In the past life he worked for Discovery Channel as Designer and Lead Web Developer. 

Small Business
Frank Wiles is President of Revolution Systems, Lawrence, KS. Expert in Internet infrastructure scaling and performance. Primarily focused on Django and PostgreSQL. 

Note: I credit Frank with providing me with a great opportunity to work with an awesome code base but also the encouragement and support to get me through my first year as a freelance consultant.

Recap of 2010

This has been an unforgettable year. I can't believe all this stuff happened. I've moved many times, met wonderful people, and seen my life change in ways I could have never predicted.

The good:

• Met a whole new bunch of wonderful people - relationships to last a lifetime. Arthur, Audrey, Celso, Cody, Daniel, Jacob, Jeff, Lahn, Moriah, Skyler, Todd and others I'm certainly forgetting to my undying shame. Thanks for your awesomeness!
• Presented and taught at Pycon 2010.
• Had a blast in the blizzard of 2010.
• Prepped my house of 9 years for sale and sold it.
• Paid off my debts. I sleep so much better now.
• Left NASA after 5 years and 3 months for freelancing pastures. Thanks Eldarion LLC, Revsys LLC, Holdenweb LLC, and Bryan Klein. Being exposed to some of the incredible code and developers on these projects has made me a better developer. Show me more!
• Flew enough in the spring to put me ahead of notorious traveller James Tauber for about 2 months in sheer mileage accumulated.
• Got to reconnect with a cousin and met his lovely wife and handsome son. Also hung out with my Uncle Al and Aunt Sandra.
• Got a tour of Ames Research Center thanks to Michael Sims. He'll probably be presenting at Pycon!
• Attended another NASA wedding by Mark and Ariel.
• Took a cruise to Mexico on a ship that caught fire just months later.
• Said goodbye to Virginia and moved to Lawrence, Kansas to run with the unicorns and 5 months later to Los Angeles, California.
• Road tripped across the Western half of the country! Twice! Spent 3 days in Las Vegas over Halloween!
• Learned fundamentals of Capoeira from Celso Wills. Wish I could learn more from him. :(
• Learned how to drive and bought my first car.
• Worked on another course for Holdenweb LLC.
• Launched Django Packages.
• Presented at DjangoCon 2010.
• Started Muay Thai classes in Los Angeles. I've done quite a bit of it, but these were the first regular classes I've had in about 16 years.
• Brought my son to Los Angeles so I could spend a week with him for the first time in 15 months.
• Almost up to 7 years without a broken bone!
• Worked another year in Python related technologies.
• Started learning LISP and played a lot more with JavaScript (especially JQuery and JQuery UI).

The bad:

• Left my students in Virginia. The young ones were especially hard to let go.
• Had to say goodbye to friends in the DC area. Some people I'll miss are Alex, Beth, Brandon, Chris, Dave, Daye, Eric, Jim, Joe, Katie, Muhammed, Pilar, Rich, Renee, Ron, Sarah, Sebastion, Shawn, Steve, and Whitney. I know I'm missing some names!
• I'm far from all my immediate family: Carla, Ciana, Dad, Doug, Michele, Midori, Mom, Seth, and Timiri.
• Watched NOVA Django falter after I left the DC area. 
• Had to wait 15 months between spending more than a day or so with my son.
• Didn't really practice much Eskrima all year.
• Didn't blog enough. Last year I blogged almost twice as much!
• Frustratingly, haven't been able to finish something that prevents me from writing about certain things. Yes, this is quite vague, and my hope is to clarify it in a few weeks.

Leaving NASA

This has been a hard post to write.

I was delighted that on January 3rd, 2005 I started my first day working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). While I wasn't working on science efforts, I was at least contributing to the cause. In 2005 I was introduced by co-worker Chris Shenton to Python, which became my favorite programming language ever. I also learned tools like Zope, Plone, and Django. Over the past five years, I've met a lot of fascinating people in and around the agency, a list that seems endless in size and scope. That includes astronauts, scientists, engineers, developers, managers, and so much more.

This meant so much to me, and maybe because my first memories of television as a child were the moon landings of the early 1970s. I dreamed as a child of being an astronomer or astronaut, and sometimes I plot how I would redo my life to fit these dreams if I got a second childhood.

In the past year I've had some incredible opportunities present themselves to me. I've been presenting frequently on Django and Pinax. I've had the singular honor of writing course material for Holdenweb, LLC on behalf of the O'Reilly School of Technology. Representing NASA as a contractor to the Python and related communities has been both enjoyable and a great honor.

Yet all things, even good ones, must come to an end.

I've decided to become an independent consultant. My first project will be working with Revolution Systems (Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Frank Wiles) on a neat stealth project that looks very promising and once launched will help people. The project will be Python/Django/Linux based, and the client insists on accessibility, testing, and quality work. We'll be exploring the boundaries of what has been done with those tools and besides what must remain proprietary, a lot of our work will end up going back to the community. Sounds like my kind of thing!

My last day is April 1, 2010. I'm both excited to explore this new project, and saddened that my professional world for the past five years is coming to an end. Yet the overlap in technology and the participation of the NASA SMD python group in the open source world means that my work with NASA isn't coming to an end, its just transforming into something different.

Nevertheless, this is the end of an era for me.

Which is partly why I'm happy that I'll still be in touch with my fellow NASA SMD Python contractors such as Katie Cunningham, Chris Shenton, Chris Adams, James Saint-Rossy, and others. I also plan to be real friendly with the awesome Ames Research Center Python/Django/FOSS groups such as the intrepid Mark Friedenbach and the entire incredibly awesome Nebula team.

I'll miss having the pleasure of working with Leslie Cahoon, Jessy Cowan-Sharp, John Kasmark, Bob Ryan, Candace Solomon, Bill Keeter, Gamble Gilbertson, Meredith Mengel, Malik Ahmad, Jenny Mottar, Mike Brody, Virginia Butcher, Dawayne Pretlor, Michele Montgomery, Jim Consalvi,Siew Chin Hon, Hans Goetzelt, Shannon Lantzy, and many more.

Lastly, I'll miss the honor of serving civil servants such as Gretchen Davidian, Sharron Sample, and Ruth Netting and others.

My pre-history with Plone

In the late 1990s I was working at a job doing a mix of Foxpro development, windows system administration, and help desk. I enjoyed the Foxpro development (laugh if you will) and despised the other stuff. So I was always looking for work in other places where I could be doing pure development. However, lacking much work experience at that time, or knowledge of other programming languages, or a college degree, that made switching positions really hard.

Well, one day, probably in 1999, I stumbled across a job opportunity down in Fredericksburg. I I got an email inviting me down for an interview for Zope Corporation, or maybe its predecessor. The job meant working with an obscure language called Python and a web based development system called Zope. Python seemed pretty interesting, and doing development through the browser seemed fascinating. I even looked up some articles on Yahoo (this was before Google and Wikipedia).

Alas, I did not take the job. Python seemed too different and obscure and I was already stuck in the closet with Foxpro. Fredericksburg would have involved a move from the Washington, DC area and my ex-wife and I were even then scraping the bottom of the barrel for money. We lived on the metro, lacking a vehicle between us, so just getting down to Fredericksburg was nigh impossible. So I stayed with Foxpro, eventually finding work in a few other languages before finding my current home in Python in 2005.

What might have been

In an alternative history had I interviewed and been hired for the Python/Zope job I might have worked with Guido van Rossum during his tenure at Zope Corp! I might still be deeply entrenched with Zope and subsequently Plone. My linux skills would be much better. Fredericksburg would be my home, not Arlington so I probably would not be working for NASA right now. I would have never founded NOVA-Django. Finally, the armies of Iceland would have conquered the world.

A very different universe indeed.

Next: My history with Plone

Recap of 2009

This has been an interesting year. Incredible life changes have meant I've gone between screaming excitement to the doldrums of depression.

The good:

• Made an amazing number of new friends this year. In alphabetical order I can think of Alex, Barbara, Brian, Chris, Eric, Jacob, James, Jannis, Jeff, Jesse, Mike, Niall, Rich, Shawn, Steve, Zain and others I'm certainly forgetting to my undying shame. Thanks for your support and also thanks for opening my eyes to what the world can be really like!
  

• I went to the West Coast for the first time! In California I visited friends in San Francisco, Palo Alto, and San Jose. In Oregon I visited Portland. The fun and food was amazing. California was vacation, Oregon was work.

• Got involved in the Python, Django, and Pinax communities, reviewed talks for Pycon, became a Pinax core developer, started up NOVA-Django, started up the still nascent Django Education Foundation.

• Worked another year in Python related technologies.
  

• Tested for my third degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Worked my Muay Thai. Got better at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Learned a little Capoeria.
  

• Almost up to 6 years without a broken bone!!!
  

• Stayed with NASA, for five years total now. Saw good people hired like Chris Adams and Tom Rando. My team set up a collaboration space. Launched a big internal Pinax powered application called SMD Spacebook and am helping on a major outreach application.

• Began my new side consulting efforts which will be mostly educational based. I like teaching anything, from martial arts to technology! Worked on a course for Holdenweb, and am teaching a long tutorial at Pycon!
  

• Reconnected with some old High School and Middle School friends. Am able to give one of them some business.
  

• My son turned 18.
  

• Grew a goatee.
  

• Kept teaching martial arts.

• Got a new road bike.
  

The bad:

• My marriage of 12+ years fell apart. I've lived in a lot of places since, but none of them my own.
  

• Participated in a well done project that lost out to a mediocre project that won because of resource attrition and refusal of customer to effectively market the effort.
  

• Didn't push hard enough to prep my house for sale until December. Going into more debt to finance the work.

• Didn't really practice much Eskrima all year.

• Lost a cat named Ao-Chan to kidney disease on Obama's Inauguration day. She was an aloof, regal, agile beauty who deigned to give us lots of love and affection.

Djangonaut Lunch in Crystal City

Django and Python developers from NASA and PBS will be gathering along with various Django/Python friends for lunch this Friday (October 2, 2009) in Crystal City, Virginia. We should also have representation from the Python Software Foundation. Join us for an afternoon meal to discuss Django, Python, local collaboration, and various other community activities.

Details are as follows:

Time:
Friday, October 2, 2009 at 1:00 PM

Restaurant:
Kora restaurant | bar | lounge
571-431-7090
2250-B Crystal Drive
Arlington, VA 22202

Reservations were made in the name of Katie Cunningham.

If you intend to come, please let us know in the comments.

Looking for work?

Looks like we are hiring again! Who are we? We are contractors for NASA's Science Mission Directorate! We are looking for Django developers or experienced Python developers who want to learn Django to come and help us do awesome stuff for NASA. Experience with CSS, JavaScript, Subversion, Linux, and experience with contributing to open source projects are definite pluses.

Before you apply you need to pass this little test of mine. If you fail any portion of this test we won't consider hiring you.

1. Are you a U.S Citizen? Yes, there are brilliant non-U.S. Citizens we really want to hire but according to the unchangeable rules we can't hire them. No exceptions. You need to be a U.S. Citizen.
2. Can you get to the office? You need to be able to get into Crystal City, Arlington, Virginia every day of the work week. No telecommuters!
3. Do you know Python? Sorry, but we aren't looking for Foxpro developers.
   
4. Are you a developer? I will throw away anything from a recruiter.
5. Can you send your resume to my email address?

The email address you need to send it to can be generated by running these two lines of code:

numbers = [100, 97, 110, 105, 101, 108, 46, 103, 114, 101, 101, 110, 102, 101, 108, 100, 45, 49, 64, 110, 97, 115, 97, 46, 103, 111, 118]

''.join([chr(x) for x in numbers])

Best DjangoCon 2009 Day Ever!

This might sound a bit familiar, but yesterday was a day I don't think I will ever be able to top again. It was one of the pinnacles of my geeky existence, and I fear that the rest of my life will be a dull effort to recapture the glory that was yesterday. Why do I think this is so?

• Fresh Oregon state blueberry pancakes for breakfast with James Tauber, Brian Rosner, and Jannis Leidel. If you know me well, you'll understand why the pancakes were so important.
• Great keynote speech by Ian Bicking.
  
• I gave my first Django and Pinax related talk in a single combined event. Me and James Tauber gave a Pinax Tutorial that besides a demo gaff at the end went very well.
• Saw a really good talk by my new Public Broadcasting System (PBS) friends! Those guys are really smart and I'm delighted they are in my home area.
  
• I participated in my first conference panel ever! We (me, Katie Cunningham, Gary Wilson, Shawn Rider, and our host Brian Luft) told our story with getting Django (and python) into our shops. Lots of great questions at the end.
• Finding out that my 508 form project django-uni-form isn't just used by NASA and Pinax, but also by PBS!
• Chocolate peanut butter filled cookies for afternoon snack.
• Got a chance to tell Chris Wanstrath not only how much I appreciated that github kept me from having to learn all the git functions besides the basic ones, but also fended off the inevitable person accosting him about github performance issues (I fully recognize that scaling complex dynamic sites can be hard).
  
• The weather was amazing with a nice second trip to Powells. We should move the conference outside.
• Fondue for dinner that was so good it shut down James Bennett for 2 minutes!
• I witnessed my fellow NASA Dangonaut from Ames Research Center, Mark Friedenbach (NAI, NLSI) get married to his lovely fiance, Ariel Lee. Pictures to follow soon!
  

Best. DjangoCon. Day. Ever.

I'll say right now that yesterday tied my 'Best Pycon 2009 Day'. I'm delighted I got something just as good as that wonderful day in the same year.

By the way, watching Mark and Ariel get married was much, much better than Zed Shaw kicking me in the nuts.