So you want to hire a ninja, do you?

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...

Lambdas, a Python Example

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...

Python 3 Will Fly Like An Unladen Swallow

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....

Need An Open Source Programmer Or Two (Beginners Welcome)

Over the past few months, I’ve been working with Rediviva Magazine on a special (somewhat secret) community project.  We’re getting closer to a possible launch and I’d like to get some more people involved so I thought I’d put the word out there to see whether there are any local programmers interested in working on it with me. Feel free to pass this...