I took a trip to Portland recently to traipse through OSCON. I was mostly in the exhibition hall with all the great schwag and company booths– many which had posted job announcements. While there, I was once again frustrated by a trend I keep seeing. The trend can be described as an “arms race of job announcements,” and has gotten to the point where it’s difficult to find a development job listed by a company that is not seeking a “ninja,” or a “rockstar,” or some similarly absurdly described candidate.
Smart …

This entry is part of a series, Block Party»
We had a great meeting last night for the RubyGorge Block Party. Pasta, beers, great talk, and programming. What more could a guy want? (Wait, don’t answer that… “No, honey! I–” <smack!>)
We stumbled a bit on our discussion of blocks, mostly because I threw Jason to the wolves (“Uh, so let’s start. Jason, go!”). Partly, it was because blocks are such an unusual concept to non-Ruby programmers, that it’s just hard to wrap your head around them.
So, I thought I’d …

Pythonistas all know about Unladen Swallow, the blazingly fast heavily optimized implementation of Python. It’s sponsored by Google1 and used extensively internally as well as in the App Engine. Like App Engine itself, it’s limited to Python 2.5, which is annoying at best for those of us who really love Py3k.
A couple days ago, I stumbled onto a post by Jesse Noller that had some really great news. Unladen Swallow is going to be merged into the Py3k branch!
…a PEP is coming, proposing Unladen Swallow be merged back to Python-core …