[Baypiggies] Introduction

[Justin A Ryan]

Well, I didn't mean to introduce myself with a negative comment about a
potential employer, but there seem to be a lot of troubles on CL with folks
getting hired as contract-to-perm and not being paid at all after their code
is deployed, emails drop, etc..  Obviously, we should ask for half up-front,
but when that's not an option, and you've turned down a lot of gigs on that
notion, eventually you just have to try something.

Anyway, I joined BayPIGGIES to know more people in the community I've lived
in for most of the past 5-6 years, so that I wouldn't be limited in future
career options to just whoever in a given week shows up for a "Python"
search on CL and to meet new enthusiasts, because Python is rad. ;)

I've been a Python enthusiast since I joined Rackspace's CORE Team around
2002, my then-manager and now-friend Nicholas David Borko published a deal
on our work which was in the Pythonology pamphlet at the first annual
O'Reilly Open-Source convention, along with four others: Google, ILM, NASA,
and NIST.  To be fair, however, I owned some of the worst PHP code at
Rackspace - as maintainer, not original author.

I lost a vote on Python vs. PHP at some point, esp after we tried to use
Plone to implement a feature for CORE.  I felt that Zope and Plone were the
sort of techs I wanted to work with, so for that and many other reasons, I
left and became a Plone / Zope developer, which I've done since 2004.  In
that time, in addition to developing a multi-tenant offering to hand this
enterprise-class Web Content Management tech to hundreds of small businesses
for around the cost of what it would cost one large business to deploy, I
launched some pretty cool websites as the Tech Lead / Web Producer using
Plone:

  http://www.siggraph.org/
  http://www.sigchi.org/ (prototyped and educated, they may have created a
new site for the final launch)
  http://www.acm.org/
  http://montreal.siggraph.org/ (Helped to get LinguaPlone translation code
into the ACM / SIGGRAPH config, so the site could be in French and English)

These days I'm in a FT search, but I've got some options, I'm not just here
for that.  I just thought I'd introduce myself..

I caught some chatter about the Silicon Valley Code Camp and I wonder if
there is any history of, or anyone on the list planning to present on Zope
technology here.  Sounds like a lot of Django excitement, which is cool and
all Python > Ruby IMO, unless you enjoy the alien dialect of Perl over
Python's nearly-pseudocode syntax, which I just don't.

There are a ton of options for using Zope tech, some of which, like
repoze.bfg, make Zope's default, if awesome, object storage optional,
allowing to map views into a dictionary based on paths.  I'm not a
particular fan of this Rails-style approach, however, and I think that there
are a lot of marketing problems for Zope.

I know that at least in the past, there have been some Plone and Zope folks
in BayPIGGIES, so I didn't want to stomp anyone else's presentation, but I'm
an experienced instructor and have gone too long without presenting on
something.  PyCon never seems to happen for me, but something CalTrain-able
from SF for a weekend is probably an option.

I look forward to meeting some of you at future events!

Best,

Justin
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