Job Offer: Python Ninja or Pirate!

[jay@etsy.com]

Etsy is an online marketplace for buying and selling all things
handmade: clothing, music, furniture,
software, jewelry, robots. We launched on June 18, 2005, and ever
since then have been empowering our
users to make a living doing what they love most.

Just a few months ago, we found a few amazingly talented ninjas and
even a few swarthy pirates. The team is doing wonderfully, and we're
hoping to add a few more adventure-loving souls to our ranks. You'll
be using python, javascript and other technologies to whip up
innovative web applications in many challenging and interesting
domains: social and community, ecommerce, search, and even software
development.

We're also in the process of redesigning and developing our web stack
to allow us to scale into outer space
while still providing a fun and productive programming environment.
You'll likely end up working on our: in-house orm, customized cherrypy
environment, jinja templates, django-like form processing library,
lucene integration, twisted-based communications protocol, or kick-ass
high-performance memcached library.

Required:
 * 5+ years of web development experience
 * 3+ years of writing production-level code with a dynamic language
(python, ruby, lisp, smalltalk,

OO javascript, etc)
 * Strong OOP skills
 * Understanding of dynamic language idioms and patterns
 * Ability and willingness to pick up other languages and technologies

Desired:
 * Ability to write python code idiomatically
 * Lives in New York City
 * Experience with javascript
 * Experience with java, postgresql and/or php

Neat:
 * Plays guitar hero


Challenge:
A valid response will be either a solution to the problem below, or a
link to some code of which you
are particularly proud.

Problem: In the dynamic language of your choice, write a short program
that will:
 1. define a list of the following user ids 42346, 77290, 729 (you can
hardcode these, but it should
still work with more or less ids)
 2. retrieve an xml document related to each user at this url "http://
api.etsy.com/feeds/xml_user_details.php?id="
 3. retrieve the data contained in the city element from each xml
document
 4. keep a running total of how many users are found in each city
 5. display the total count of users living in each city

You can assume user ids are valid and that the url is available. The
output should look something
like:

Charlotte: 1
New York: 2

You can find out more about etsy at http://www.etsy.com or
http://blog.etsy.com/jobs/index.html